Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life

Facto Post – Issue 2 – 13 July 2017

Facto Post – Issue 2 – 13 July 2017 Editorial: Core models and topics Wikimedians interest themselves in everything under the sun — and then some. Discussion on "core topics" may, oddly, be a fringe activity, and was popular here a decade ago. The situation on Wikidata today does resemble the halcyon days of 2006 of the English Wikipedia. The growth is there, and the reliability and stylistic issues are not yet pressing in on the project. Its Berlin conference at the end of October will have five years of achievement to celebrate. Think Wikimania Frankfurt 2005. Progress must be made, however, on referencing "core facts". This has two parts: replacing "imported from Wikipedia" in referencing by external authorities; and picking out statements, such as dates and family relationships, that must not only be reliable but be seen to be reliable. In addition, there are many properties on Wikidata lacking a clear data model. An emerging consensus may push to the front key sourcing and biomedical properties as requiring urgent attention. Wikidata's "manual of style" is currently distributed over thousands of discussions. To make it coalesce, work on such a core is needed. Links WikiFactMine project pages on Wikidata, including a SPARQL library (in development). Fatameh tool for adding items on scientific papers to Wikidata, by User: T Arrow. It has made a big recent impact. Offline for maintenance as we go to press, it is expected back soon. As of July 2017, Zotero has a Wikidata translator. A personal Zotero library acts as an intermediary in managing and storing citation metadata. GLAM Newsletter June 2017, Wikidata report. This is a good monthly round-up to follow, and welcomes contributions. Exciting and Impressive! The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) was launched in April: Infodocket on the first three months. Olivia Solon in San Francisco, Why the net neutrality protest matters, opinion piece in The Guardian on 11 July. Editor Charles Matthews. Please leave feedback for him. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Opted-out of message delivery to your user talk page. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

Arctocephalus forsteri requested move discussion

I've set up a RM discussion on the talk page for what you may know as New Zealand fur seal. Some controversy about whether to use scientific name or use common name. Please feel free to comment.....

Request for comment: categorizing by year of formal description

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Although there have been discussions at this WikiProject and some descendants on how to categorize by year of formal description, they did not result in a set of guidelines to assist editors, and, particularly in recent years, the system has become somewhat of a mess, with extra categories added without consensus (e.g. for "deuterostomes") or for only a few years for groups where there might be consensus. There are also strange extra categories (e.g. Category:Taxa by century), with no clear purpose, rationale or explanation as to how they fit into the overall scheme. I've prepared a draft set of guidelines at User:Peter coxhead/Categorizing by year of formal description.

I am requesting:

• ideas for changes and improvements to my draft guidelines
• agreement to move the guidelines resulting from this discussion into the space of this WikiProject.

Comments please. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:47, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

It seems Caftaric is always involved in these messes, and that they never take part in wider discussions. Have anyone ever come through to them? If this continues, and Caftaric keeps ignoring recommendations, maybe some kind of action is needed. FunkMonk (talk) 10:52, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

If we can achieve an agreed set of guidelines with a clear consensus behind them, it will be much easier to resist changes by any editor, including Caftaric. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:59, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Note that Caftaric was just blocked indefinitely[1] as a sockpuppeteer, so now it might be time to overturn some of their more dubious deeds. FunkMonk (talk) 16:15, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

I do think we should not focus on any one editors work on main space or talk page space in relation to this, but rather establish a consistent policy that goes across all the projects that are associated with the tree of life project.

One small problem is the increased uncertainty as to the future of portals. The usage of portal tags on main page space in categories, has helped where a category and any main space is all in latin - and there is nothing to identify whether the item is animal vegetable or mineral...

However - what Peter is suggesting - a unified across project system of established policy and framework for how the category trees for the projects are created and linked - I believe is something which the projects require. Consistency and established format - is something that should be encouraged. JarrahTree 12:04, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Not sure if these questions are germane in the present discussion but if explicit guidelines are being made it might be nice to be explicit about additional things that might be confusing: namely what to put as the year and when/if these cats should go in redirects instead of the actual article. It also might be worth being explicit this is about dates of publication, not when it was written/submitted for publication/had its preprint appear/etc. I would also appreciate explicit guidelines as to how to categorize by year with nomina nova: by the year the present replacement name was published or by the year the year associated with the earliest scientific name? (And does it matter if the first name was invalid to begin with due to a preexisting senior homonym in the genus, or became invalid later due to a subsequent transfer?)

I'd also appreciate clarity as to where to put the categories. It's my understanding based on past edits I've seen from other editors, that for monospecific genera, the Species-described-in-year cats should not go in the article titled with the genus name (which would also be the article for the species), but rather those categories should go on the redirect with the species name as the title. To give an example from articles I've written following what I understand to be consensus, the article for the monospecific genus Seycellesa does not contain Category:Spiders described in 1898 as that would put a genus named in 2008 in that category; rather the category is in the redirect Seycellesa braueri so the species appears in the category. (I wish I could remember / find other examples that I didn't write...) But, it seems that when the title of an article is a common name, then these categories are in the article, even though these categories are about a particular binomen. So for instance Grey wolf has Category:Mammals described in 1758. Also do subspecies get these categories? I see a lot of articles for subspecies with them, e.g., Dog, East African wild dog, Bengal tiger... Thanks for any clarification; hopefully future guidelines can elucidate some of these issues Umimmak (talk) 13:22, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Ummimak raises some points that have long been in needed of clarification; how to deal with monospecific genera, vernacular name titles, nomina nova, and perhaps subspecies. Regarding monospecific genera, general practice seems to be putting the category on the species redirect, which is consistent with the guideline WP:INCOMPATIBLE. Working mostly on plant articles colors my perspective on vernacular name titles and nomina nova. ~400 plant articles (out of ~60,000) use vernacular name titles. For plants, usually both the binomial redirect and the vernacular titled article have the species/year category. I think that's fine for any group where vernacular name titles are rarely used, but am not sure about best practice for birds and mammals. Outside of birds and mammals, I do think the priority should be on categorizing the binomial redirect (per WP:INCOMPATIBLE; vernacular named taxa may have been described by Aristotle, but we're really taking about description under the ICZN/ICNafp), however I don't see much harm in also categorizing a handful of vernacular titled articles. Regarding nomina nova, there's a big difference between the ICZN and ICNafp in terms of how often the year relevant for priority purposes is the year that an organism was first described under the relevant code. The priority year for Arabidopsis thaliana is 1842, but it was first described scientifically as Arabis thaliana in 1753. A. thaliana is in the 1753 category. I don't pay a lot of attention to correcting species/year categories, but my impression is that plants are pretty consistently categorized by year of first description, not the year of the current combination. This leads me to think that animals should also go with year of first description, when the original name has been replaced due to secondary homonymy (though I'm less sure about how to treat taxa that were unavailable from their original description). Pterodontia westwoodi is currently categorized by the date of a replacement name, not the first description. Plantdrew (talk) 15:55, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Yeah that's fair. Like I said I wasn't sure if these issues were part of the relevant discussion. I'm okay focusing just on Peter coxhead's proposal re (sub)categorization of the categories themselves at the moment; I just wanted to raise these while the topic of writing an explanation was at hand in case there was interest in having a more comprehensive guide to these cats. Umimmak (talk) 16:05, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

@Umimmak: I think that more detailed guidelines are needed, but I also think that most of them have to be discussed in lower level wikiprojects. As Plantdrew notes above, there are important differences between the nomenclature codes, so what may be appropriate for plants and fungi isn't necessarily so for animals, and there are very marked differences in the use of English names as titles. However, if there is anything more that works across all groups of organisms, then it should certainly be added to my draft. I was just trying to set out hopefully noncontroversial guidelines that apply to organisms generally. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:07, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I'd like to raise some points here about the taxonomic ranks, which @Umimmak: alluded to. in @Peter coxhead:'s essay it specifically mentions this is about species. I feel that is fine, but either the categories need to explicitly state that (i.e. 'Plant species described in 2018') or they need to be diligently patrolled for all the genera and higher taxa that will end up there. Also, what would be the solution for sorting higher taxa into categories by year of formal description, and how would that differ from what we would want for species? --Nessie (talk) 02:42, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

@NessieVL: it's always been clear that only species are to be categorized by year of (formal) description. The same appoach could be extended to those ranks explicitly covered by a nomenclature code and hence where priority exists (i.e. families downwards) but I'm not aware that this has ever been discussed. Above genus, for many groups there aren't good secondary sources, as would be required. This would be a whole new discussion! Let's sort out the existing system for classifying species by year of description first. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:21, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

The restriction of this categorization to species has not been clear to me at all; I thought the main category was "Taxa described in ..." (see for example Category:Taxa described in 2001), and I have been adding higher-level taxa to these categories for fungi. I do not see why this categorization should be restricted to species, and would support a more inclusive scheme. Will watch this discussion. Polyporales (talk) 19:14, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

@Polyporales: I'm not arguing that there couldn't be complete category hierarchies for other ranks up to family, but the only fully developed systems, e.g. like those for plants, animals, birds or fungi, are only for species because they have some form of "Species described in ..." category as an ancestor. Start at Category:Species described in the 18th century, for example. You can work your way down to Category:Fungi described in 1767, among others. So the fungi must be species, not other ranks. Unfortunately, random additions of categories without the use of an overall structure diagram like those in my draft has produced a muddle, and editors can't be blamed for not being clear how it was supposed to work. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:08, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

On the topic of "columns", I was curious to see what system is currently in place and hope this might be useful to others involved in the discussion. Here's what is already in place for 1758, 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950, 2000, and 2018. You'll note a lack of consistency... I think we can agree that all years should have the same supersets/subsets, yeah? The current system is confusing -- an editor should expect that if a category exists for one year it will exist for all years. To pick one, we have Corals described in 1758 1766, 1786, 1816, 1833, 1834, 1846, 1848, 1849. Should the corresponding category be made for all other years? Or should they be removed? Should an editor feel free to add a new year category if there is already a category for a different year or should year categories only be made by consensus of the relevent wikiprojects? And this is something that'll probably have to be discussed for each category... (I think I would also want to give my two cents and recommend against things like Protostomes described in year since this is not a particularly lay-friendly term.) Anyway, hoping these are representative, illustrative, and useful:

Category:Species described in 1758

•      Animals described in 1758
•           Amphibians described in 1758
•           Arachnids described in 1758‎
•                Spiders described in 1758‎
•           Birds described in 1758
•           Corals described in 1758‎
•           Crustaceans described in 1758‎
•           Fish described in 1758‎
•           Insects described in 1758
•                Beetles described in 1758‎
•                Butterflies described in 1758‎
•                Moths described in 1758
•           Mammals described in 1758‎
•           Molluscs described in 1758
•      Plants described in 1758‎

Category:Species described in 1800

•      Animals described in 1800‎
•           Amphibians described in 1800‎
•           Birds described in 1800‎
•           Fish described in 1800‎
•           Insects described in 1800‎
•                Beetles described in 1800‎
•                Moths described in 1800‎
•           Mammals described in 1800‎
•           Molluscs described in 1800‎
•           Reptiles described in 1800‎
•      Fungi described in 1800‎
•      Plants described in 1800‎

Category:Species described in 1850

•      Animals described in 1850‎
•           Amphibians described in 1850‎
•           Birds described in 1850‎
•           Crustaceans described in 1850‎
•           Fish described in 1850‎
•           Insects described in 1850‎
•                Beetles described in 1850‎
•                Butterflies described in 1850‎
•                Moths described in 1850‎
•           Mammals described in 1850‎
•           Molluscs described in 1850‎
•                Gastropods described in 1850‎
•           Reptiles described in 1850‎
•           Spiders described in 1850‎
•      Fungi described in 1850‎
•      Plants described in 1850‎

Category:Species described in 1900

•      Animals described in 1900
•           Birds described in 1900‎
•           Fish described in 1900‎
•           Insects described in 1900‎
•                Beetles described in 1900‎
•                Lepidoptera described in 1900‎
•                     Butterflies described in 1900‎
•                     Moths described in 1900‎
•           Mammals described in 1900‎
•           Molluscs described in 1900‎
•                Gastropods described in 1900‎
•           Spiders described in 1900‎
•      Bacteria described in 1900‎
•      Fungi described in 1900‎
•      Plants described in 1900‎

Category:Species described in 1950

•      Bacteria described in 1950
•      Eukaryotes described in 1950‎
•           Animals described in 1950‎
•                Insects described in 1950‎
•                     Beetles described in 1950‎
•                     Moths described in 1950‎
•                Molluscs described in 1950‎
•                     Gastropods described in 1950‎
•                Spiders described in 1950‎
•                Vertebrates described in 1950‎
•                     Birds described in 1950‎
•                     Fish described in 1950‎
•                     Mammals described in 1950‎
•           Fungi described in 1950‎
•      Plants described in 1950‎

Category:Species described in 2000

•      Archaea described in 2000‎
•      Bacteria described in 2000‎
•      Eukaryotes described in 2000‎
•           Animals described in 2000‎
•                Insects described in 2000‎
•                     Beetles described in 2000‎
•                     Moths described in 2000‎
•                Molluscs described in 2000‎
•                     Gastropods described in 2000‎
•                Spiders described in 2000‎
•                Vertebrates described in 2000‎
•                     Birds described in 2000‎
•                     Fish described in 2000‎
•                     Mammals described in 2000‎
•                     Reptiles described in 2000‎
•           Fungi described in 2000‎
•      Plants described in 2000‎

Category:Species described in 2018

•      Bacteria described in 2018‎
•      Eukaryotes described in 2018‎
•           Animals described in 2018‎
•                Protostomes described in 2018‎
•                     Arthropods described in 2018‎
•                          Insects described in 2018‎
•                               Beetles described in 2018‎
•                               Moths described in 2018‎
•                          Spiders described in 2018‎
•                     Molluscs described in 2018‎
•                Vertebrates described in 2018
•                     Fish described in 2018‎

Umimmak (talk) 18:40, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Also just to confirm is the Category:Fossil taxa by century etc a completely different system? Cause I would assume a fossil species is still a spider or a vertebrate or an insect or whatever, but it seems like these categories are systematically excluded from articles about fossil species, and this isn't intuitive to me. E.g. Aphaenogaster mersa does not have Category:Insects described in 1915 but only has Category:Fossil taxa described in 1915; Woolly mammoth does not have Category:Mammals described in 1799 but only has Category:Fossil taxa described in 1799, etc. If these are meant to be completely parallel systems I think it could be better clarified as well. Umimmak (talk) 18:56, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

@Umimmak: you've raise a good question, to which I don't have a really good answer. I think that the categories we've been discussing so far are meant for extant species. One issue with extinct taxa is that we tend to concentrate on the genus rather than the species, so a slightly different approach seems justified The scenario I had in mind was that we would try to agree a basic set of guidelines here at the parent ToL WikiProject, but that there would then need to be more detailed guidelines relating to different groups, which could be discussed at the relevant lower level WikiProjects. I think this applies to extinct taxa. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:48, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

So the categories for A. mersa, Woolly mammoth, and other articles for fossil species, will need to be decided by Wikipedia:WikiProject Insects, Wikipedia:WikiProject Mammals, etc., in collaboration with I guess Wikipedia:WikiProject Palaeontology. It just seemed like there was consensus based on articles for fossil species (which do exist; they're not all only discussed at genus-level -- mostly when there are other extant species in the same genus it seems) to only include the Fossil taxa described in YEAR category and not the Species described in YEAR category, and this is unclear from the current draft proposal. And if this is consensus now it should be stated in the overarching guideline.

Also, I think it could also be clearer with the Such subdivisions should only be created etc section what to do when there are such subdivision years for some years (e.g. coral as illustrated above). It is a basic tenet that all years should have the same subdivisions, yeah? This seems to be what you're envisioning with when there is a commitment to set up a more-or-less complete set of "Xs described in YEAR" categories, rather than a few random years. -- and I guess it's up to the relevant wikiprojects how to actually divvy them up? So whether the Coral described in YEAR categories get removed altogether or created for every year will need to result from a collaboration of WP:WikiProject Marine life and WP:WikiProject Animals.

I guess if all the details seem to either be under the purview for other sub-wikiprojects, then your proposal is completely unobjectionable but also not particularly helpful for an editor looking for guidance. The main points I get from your draft are that nothing articles for nothing above the species group should have such categories (further discussion as to subspecies, articles with common name titles, etc) and people should not create new categories willy-nilly without consensus from relevant wikiprojects, which are both unobjectionable. I suppose you're envisioning the wikiprojects forAnimals, Plants, Fungi, Bacteria, and Paleontology to work out the other minutiae which editors will have questions about, imho this decentralization is less than optimal -- especially since there ideally should be agreement and there probably will end up mostly being agreement. I just know from your draft I still have many outstanding questions and ideally this would mostly get ironed out now instead of hoping sub wikiprojects will get around to it eventually. Particularly as the examples above and myriad others would already require multiple wikiprojects' input it made sense to me to hash out as much of the details at the Tree of Life level. Umimmak (talk) 02:01, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

@Umimmak: it's clear that differences between the nomenclature codes mean that species named under the ICZN need somewhat different guidelines from those named under the ICNafp. WP:PLANTS already has guidance on categorizing by year of description; I think that some will also be needed at WP:ANIMALS. How much further to go down is up to wikiprojects, in my view: e.g. some groups have "by decade", some don't. This can be left to the lowest level. But, yes, my draft leaves questions unanswered – deliberately, because at this stage I didn't want to get bogged down in complex taxonomic issues, such as when exactly is the "year of first description" when there are replacement names, earlier descriptions attached to unacceptable names, etc. Step by step! Peter coxhead (talk) 07:40, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

I think not stepping on the toes of other WikiProjects is good, but as the parent project ToL needs to set up guidelines. The sub projects can modify or abrogate the recommendations, but atleast they will know what most projects will be doing more or less. I'm sure many projects will just want to match what the rest of the tree is doing, unless they need some sort of special consideration for something particular to their branch. Specifically, in the case of fossil taxa, as they touch on every other project here and can include extant subtaxa, we should have a dialog with them parallel to this one. --Nessie (talk) 14:29, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

@NessieVL: maybe I was being too pessimistic, but I've seen too many discussions like this get bogged down in disagreements about some of the details, with the result that nothing got decided. So my idea is that we would first agree a basic set of guidelines here. Once these guidelines are accepted, we can work on filling in more details, either here or at a lower level as seems most appropriate. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:29, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Related discussion - portals in these categories

Should we have relevant portals in these categories, for example {{Portal|Plants}} on Category:Plants described in 1997? Also, {{Portal|Years}} seems unnecessary in that example category. Ping to JarrahTree who added them both. This RfC seemed the most apropos location for this question but might be a bit off-topic; feel free to move.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  04:26, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

!Votes

• Support. My understanding is that the basic issues Peter's proposal seeks to clarify is that a)decade/century categories should be container categories and b)new subcategories require consensus, and if supported, an effort should be made to quickly create subcategories for all years. Plantdrew (talk) 16:55, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

On further thought, I'm not sure why we should have decade container categories; they are barely big enough to be viable (10 entries), and century categories would not be overly large without decades (100 items). Decades are mostly just an extra step to drill down through. Plantdrew (talk) 17:52, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm sympathetic to omitting decade categories – birds don't have them, for example. But I wouldn't want any disagreements about this issue to prevent agreement on the other parts of the draft. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:07, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

For clarity, I added to User:Peter coxhead/Categorizing by year of formal description a diagram showing how I think the categories should be for birds, where decades are omitted. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:28, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

• Support the generalized notions here with one comment. To me as a professional taxonomist it seems more reasonable to consistently list species names in a category the reflects the original description, in its original combination. Irrespective of what its current combination is. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 04:09, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

This is what WP:WikiProject Plants/Description in year categories says for ICNafp names, with the example of Muscari racemosum Mill. (1768) which is a replacement name for Hyacinthus muscari L. (1753) and is categorized as "described in 1753". I'd be very happy for this to be added to the draft provided it's not controversial to apply the same to ICZN names. If it is, it should be discussed elsewhere (e.g. at WikiProject Animals). Peter coxhead (talk) 08:11, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

This is one thing the ICZN, ICBN and Mycology Codes agree on. Its no problem with anaimals either. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 17:01, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

• Support - I have no views on the rows (decades etc) but I'd like some restriction on the number of columns. Species/animals/insects/moths seems about right, i.e 4 or 5 columns, no more. I upmerged an 'invertebrate' column (partially implemented) at cfd, 26 Nov 2014, but others have introduced a 'vertebrates' one which in my opinion is a hindrance as it doesn't collect together enough subcats to be worthwhile. Eg in Category:Species described in 2015, Eukaryotes merely collects together 2 subcats and Category:Animals described in 2015 also just has 2 subcats. Oculi (talk) 17:56, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
• Support — the current situation is a mess, so a scheme is needed, and the suggestion looks good. Decade "rows" are perhaps redundant, but do not do much harm either. Major groups of animals with good coverage warrant their own "column". Thus, I would keep the main vertebrate groups separate, removing the need for "vertebrates". Similarly for few select invertebrate groups. Micromesistius (talk) 18:18, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
• Support — I think this is enough to start with, and it would be best, if possible, to agree it and and put it in place. Details like which page is to be categorised when the species article is not at an accepted binomial name can follow. William Avery (talk) 13:35, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
• Support — especially if new decade cats are omitted and existing decade cats CfD'd, with contents upmerged to century container cats.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  21:44, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
• Support - just for an agreed consistency across range of subjects/areas is really good JarrahTree 23:03, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
• Support - Bringing a set of definable criteria and usage of species description year categories into one coherent system would be a valuable improvement to our present state. However, I do agree with Micromesistius that few, if any, readers are actually interested in searching by these categories in the first place. The real value here seems to be to have an agreed upon code that would allow us to delete other arbitrary undefined categories used for descriptions. My real dislike is the use of country names (as opposed to bio-geographic regions) as category names (eg. Birds of Benin). Loopy30 (talk) 11:43, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
• Generally Support: I've created some animal categories (butterflies, molluscs, crustaceans, etc.), so I generally like the more specific ones. There are however, some years where some categories either lack any or have relatively few members to add. I've been bypassing some years where there are either no members or only 1 or 2 species. My rule of thumb has been 3, but I see other editors have created categories for as little as one species. Is this over categorizing?......Pvmoutside (talk) 15:58, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

No. WP:SMALLCAT says "Avoid categories that, by their very definition, will never have more than a few members, unless such categories are part of a large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme"; there's nothing in the definition of "described in year" categories that says they will remain small, and even if one does, the categories are part of a "large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme". The system for a given group should be as complete as possible. There may only be 1 or 2 species now, but the category needs to exist so editors can use it when articles are created for species described in that year. Otherwise it becomes a vicious cycle: the year category doesn't get used because it doesn't exist so it continues not to be used. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:35, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for that Peter.....Pvmoutside (talk) 00:49, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose and instead delete all of these categories. This kind of data is better suited for a database (like WikiData), not for categorization. I'm also doubtful that many readers are interested in these categories, since the year of description is of little importance outside of technical nomenclatural discussions. I especially dislike the subdivision into semi-arbitrary taxonomic groups. Within Category:Animals_described_in_1909, some subcategories are by class (insects, amphibians), others by phylum (mollusks), others by subphylum (vertebrates), others by informal group (fish). Sure, we could clean that up, but I don't think we need to spend more time perfecting a categorization system that isn't useful in the first place. Ucucha (talk) 16:28, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
  • @Ucucha: I have a lot of sympathy for this view, but feel that a compromise is more likely to be accepted. (Actually, I'm doubtful that the great majority of categories in the English Wikipedia are of any interest to readers.) Peter coxhead (talk) 17:12, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

RfC implementation

It looks like a good time to start implementation? I've been working on a Module:Category described in year, under the general guidance of Peter coxhead, to make category creation & maintenance as painless & intuitive as possible, but the module will still require concurrent development alongside 'manual' category tree standardization. The "Fish" tree in that module is the target standard model cat tree, i.e. the "Spiders" & "Plants" trees in that module will migrate away from using intermediate 'decade' cats. Will let this sit for a few days first before taking any action, then I'll point back to this discussion when making changes/CfDs/new cats/etc.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  16:06, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

@Tom.Reding: I was hoping some uninvolved editor would formally close the RfC above, but the consensus seems clear, so I agree. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:03, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I was looking for that too, but with over a month after the last comment, and almost 2 months after the start, it doesn't seem likely.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  10:15, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Two issues

Hello all:

1. I have placed a comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life/Assessment if someone in that field could have a look.
2. Regarding the Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life#Taxonomic resources. The "General taxonomy" resources are led by the Catalogue of Life, which has now grown to cover 1.8m of the world's 1.9 named species. Currently, the main resource for "Mammals" is Mammal Species of the World edition 3 of 2005, now getting a little dated. I am the person who some time ago was instrumental in getting MSW3 listed on the WikiProject Mammals page as its taxonomic reference. Has anyone here on TOL got any thoughts on when we might move away from MSW3 and onto COL for mammals? William Harris • (talk) • 10:10, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

The 4th edition of Mammal Species of the World was due at the end of 2017. It's still not listed on the Johns Hopkins Press website, although their fall catalogue must be due relatively soon. I'm beginning to wonder if it will be published.

The American Society of Mammalogists, who oversaw the MSW project have a new database, the ASM Mammal Diversity Database, which I think might be the future. It is still in the early development stages, but seems up to date on Felidae (it notes the recently revised species and subspecies by the IUCN Cat Specialist Group) and Canidae (e.g. Canis).

At the moment I would say MSW3 is too dated for the taxonomy source and the ASM database too developmental. I don't think Catalogue of Life helps as that follows MSW3 for mammals (e.g. still has Soricomorpha and Erinaceomorpha for Eulipotyphla ). There doesn't seem a good authoritative source at present. Hopefully MSW4 will be publised soon or the ASM database project matures.   Jts1882 | talk  13:34, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks JTS for your speedy reply. Regarding mammals, COL draws on the ITIS database as its source data supplier. ITIS mammals are based on MSW3, but it has already moved away from MWS3 on some e.g. the recently "discovered" in 2015 Canis anthus is recognized. If MSW4 is ever put together, even as an online database, it will simply feed into COL. From what I am seeing, COL is the future. I am not sure the rest of the planet is going to run with the taxonomic pronouncements of the American Society of Mammologists as the final authority. Interesting developments. Regards, William Harris • (talk) • 22:28, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

It's worth clarifying, I think, that there are two different issues with classification systems. If our article titles and taxoboxes are to be consistent and articles not duplicated at synonyms, we need, as far as possible, to use one source. On the other hand, to maintain WP:NPOV, article text needs to discuss all reliably sourced systems. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:36, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Wouldn't the solution be to redirect all the synonyms? I'm skeptical about adopting one source's approach as something akin to an "official WP standard". An attempt to do something like that is what led to about a decade of editwarring, movewarring, WP:POLICYFORKing, and other battlegrounding over upper/lower case in vernacular names of species, and it was a nasty episode we should learn from rather than repeat. I'm not sure I immediately detect the potential for something like that, if we adopted CoL for titles and taxoboxes. But I don't think anyone predicted a decade of disruption over trying to integrate IOC vernacular names into our title and infobox systems, either. So, I'm not opposed, but urging caution.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:46, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

We need to be wary of circularity here too. CoL often uses Wikipedia and Wikispecies for its information, it may also cite other sources but its fairly obvious what they are doing. If we cite them and they are citing us we are in a circle and this is not good information. Also be aware that online resources are not peer reviewed reviews and hence subject to issues of personal opinion. It is better to find peer reviewed and regularly updated checklists for the classification and nomenclature of species. I have no problem utilising the online resources but they should as much as possible be backed up by referencing the peer reviewed literature. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 17:50, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

I have asked some associates who are SSC chairs for some information on possible checklists to utilise. Will let people know what I find out. For info for turtles I have been recommending the IUCN Checklist of turtles. This is peer reviewed and updated every 18 months (since 2007 latest is 2017). Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 18:13, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

CoL uses Wikipedia as a source? That's the first I've heard that, do you have any example? I do see EOL and GBIF using Wikipedia as a source, so maybe CoL picks up Wikipedia secondarily via EOL?

@SMcCandlish:, redirecting ALL synonyms could be a solution, but that is a rather tall order. I think the average is something like 4 synonyms for each valid/accepted name, but the distribution is very uneven. Common, widely distributed species may have dozens of synonyms, while rare, recently described species may have none. Some potential synonyms are the subjects of current taxonomic disagreements, but the majority haven't been treated as valid/accepted by anybody in decades. I'm not sure it's a good use of editors efforts to make redirects for synonyms that haven't been used in 150 years. And some "synonyms" are actually junior homonyms that may not be flagged as homonyms in a given database. I've come across numerous "synonym" redirects where there is a senior homonym that is accepted/valid. Plantdrew (talk) 18:16, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: yes that is one way it is happening, via EOL, many of these online resources are linking back to very few sources, including us, and are not necessarily incorporating a check mechanism of actually looking for taxonomic reviews.

On the issue of redirects, I would limit it to ones that may be used, ie recently sunk names, for whatever reason, ones that do appear in the recent literature. I agree that 150 year old names, often nomen dubium anyway, are not worth the effort in this forum. The can also be what are more or less homynyms across kingdom, these are not technically hmonyms as each code is limited to a kingdom, more or less, but the names are the same. Though these are rare and could be handled by disambiguation. However, its probably not worth the effort. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 18:28, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Had a chat with Russ Mittermeier the chair of the Primate SSC for the IUCN, his recommendation is Lynx Edicions Handbook of the Mammals of the World as the most up to date and comprehensive lists for mammals that has full support of the IUCN. He also offered to provide their own internal update for volume 3 on Primates that is 100% up to date if we would like to use it. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 18:38, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

I know it's a lot of work, but it's something that could be automated: Produce machine-readable synonym list (from multiple sources); tell bot to create corresponding redirects where they do not already exist, with the proper rcat templates; output post-run lists of pre-existing redirs (total, correct according to the list, going to the wrong place according to the list, and correct interrelationship but backwards order according to the list); if a classification changes, just tweak the list and the next bot pass will produce a new output list of stuff to adjust; maybe it would have options to make conforming changes; and merged/split taxa would have to be dealt with manually. Old synonyms should still redirect, because people still encounter them in old sources; e.g., I've run across all kinds of old bi- and trinomials for what is presently usually called Felis catus, and I ended up manually creating redirects for them, including early, abandoned attempts to define some breeds, like the Siamese, as subspecies. It might be that they really aren't worth the effort, even if being done by bot, but we can't really have "Prevent creation of duplicate articles at different names" and "Only create redirs for a few, recent synonyms" at the same time; they're antithetical. The latter would likely come at the cost of the former being impossible.

PS: As for the other matter: if CoL really is using WP and WikiSpecies data, via any route, that would be a pretty serious issue.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:02, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

do remember that the liklihood you will come across an old name is dependant on what and why you read about a species. As a taxonomist I frequently find old names as I spend a lot of time examining the original literature. However the majority of readers will not see a lot of synonyms, hence I still think the recent and commonly seen ones are enough. Complete synonymies are on Wikispecies and in various checklists for those who need them. Sure add them add hoc if you wish or find them but for the most time its not necessary I think and I would not like to see it become policy. I agree circularity of authorities is a big issue, hence I bring it up alot, here, at Wikidata and Wikispecies. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 19:26, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

A couple of points: (1) Some synonyms are the same as legitimate organism names. It might be nice not to make redirects for these, since it is confusing for someone searching for the legitimately named organism, and it makes it harder for someone creating a page for the legitimately named organism. (2) As mentioned above, I think some synonyms have close to zero probability of being used by a Wikipedia reader. It seems like quite a few obscure synonyms could be omitted. Bob Webster (talk) 20:33, 27 June 2018 (UTC) ,

Not sure what you mean by your point 1. Names are available or not and if available are valid or not (in zoology terminology slightly different for plants). In any case all synonyms are available names but there can only be one valid name for a taxon, all others are synonyms. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 00:42, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

@Faendalimas: point 1 is (I think) the same point that's made above by Plantdrew: some synonyms are junior homonyms, and must not be used as redirects, even if no article yet exists at the valid use of the name. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:03, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Here is a list of COL databases, those mentioned above as suspect "linking from" are not listed. William Harris • (talk) • 08:49, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

We've gotten pretty sidetracked from your initial question, but to bring it back on track. In the absence of a MSW4, we should use perhaps use ITIS if ITIS is more up to date for mammals. I don't think we should CoL directly for anything. We can use CoL source databases for relevant taxa. Plantdrew (talk) 13:39, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: Yes sorry we have got sidetracked. I have a recommendation from Russel Mittermeier and Anthony Rylands both from the IUCN. They recommend Lynx Edicions Handbook of the Mammals of the World and have also sent me their comprehensive update to the Primate volume of this that they did at the IUCN meetings. It is 100% up to date. I am happy to forward the primate list to anyone who wants it. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 13:46, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

The Handbook of the Mammals of the World looks excellent. The problems are accessibility and publication dates. How many people have access to the books? The newer volumes will be up to date but older volumes (e.g. Vol. 1. Carnivores, 2009) will be outdated. It might be better to use the IUCN specialist groups. The Cat SG taxonomy is already the de facto standard for the felid taxonomy on the English Wikipedia, but the primate SG taxonomy on their website is as dated as MSW3.   Jts1882 | talk  15:10, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

What the mammal SSC's at the IUCN are doing is using the Handbook of the Mammals of the World and maintaining updates of it. So the SSC updates are basically this book with new taxa added. I have the primate one in my possession I can probably get the others as I am a member of an SSC. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 15:53, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Plantdrew, when you state: "I don't think we should CoL directly for anything. We can use CoL source databases for relevant taxa." COL is simply an IT infrastructure "backbone" to house and deploy these other databases. It produces nothing by itself. It is also publicly accessible.

Even with the proposed books, these have a similar issue to MSW3 - they are rarely printed, quickly become out of date, and one must ask which database each one was based on. This is the second decade of the 21st Century - the day of the printed book as a taxonomic reference is over. We need to move to an accessible online database - it is becoming clear which one, the question I asked - specifically for mammals - was when? Currently, nobody has provided a valid reason as to why COL should not be used.

@Tony 1212:, you maintain a taxon database, do you have an opinion to share? William Harris • (talk) • 22:31, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

well COL is only as good as the databases it uses. As a taxonomist I rarely use the databases they use because they are too out of date. Books are not good taxonomic references that is true and I do not use them. But it seems for mammals the best way is to use whatever the most up to date lists are being made from. That's the recommendation of the mammal specialist groups. Who also do not use COL. Online databases are problematic. ITIS is barely up to date if at all, certainly no better than relatively recent books. I got you the recommendation of the IUCN specialist groups on mammals. My specialty is turtles, I also will not use COL or ITIS I cannot, its not up to date and is self contradictory. Better to follow the peer reviewed literature. The best method is internationally ratified checklists, but there is not one for mammals. There is for turtles. The closest mammals get to are the lists maintained by the IUCN which are updates from the book I said they recommended. So valid reasons for not using COL, not peer reviewed, non transparent assessment, unable to make valid nomenclatural acts to improve issues (is illegal under the Code), what references it uses have the same issues they do. They also use EOL which uses us hence circularity. COL is an ok guideline and start point, but every species in it must then be assessed against the literature to see if they are out of date (they can be as much as 10 years out of date). They are not utilised or followed by taxonomists, I have never yet read a taxonomic or nomenclatural peer reviewed paper that cites them. Since I am a nomenclatural taxonomist thats my job to do that. As for access I have already offered to send the IUCN lists to anyone who wants them, these are currently updated to June this year. So you have access to them. Yes the books are expensive and as I said I agree that books are not the best taxonomic resource, the peer reviewed literature is. All that literature is available on line, when in doubt go to SciHub. Or ask me, taxonomic literature is my job as I have said and I have already offered. Online databases always take shortcuts are usually subject to personal opinion of its few authors and as they are not peer reviewed there is not check mechanism to prevent this. COL is easy, yes thats true, but there is an easy way and a correct way. You want the taxonomy of these groups to be easy or correct.

I wish someone would do checklists for each major group, its something I have been encouraging, I have also suggested to the ICZN that the practice of making nomenclatural acts in books is out dated and should be made illegal under the code for the 5th edition of the ICZN code (being written), you should also by the way be utilising another resource no one has mentioned and that is ZooBank, since it is a registry of all available names online and maintained by the ICZN. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 01:28, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

Oh last point, the books in question are work of the authors of each title, are based on their own research, not the reusing of unpublished databases available online. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 01:36, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

On your point about checklists there might be some hope with HMW in future. The HBW series was followed by the Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World which has an online version of the checklist. But the bird folk seem very keen on checklists, while they have become a rarity with mammals. I do not know whether this is planned or not for HMW, but I can't see it coming out until after the last volume of HMW (Bats, next year?).   Jts1882 | talk  13:03, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

@William Harris:, my understanding is that CoL IDs and links aren't stable. That understanding is based on a blogpost from 2013, so perhaps that situation has changed. While the post focuses on problems with CoL's implementation of LSID, it also claims that CoL internal database identifiers aren't stable. This (non LSID) link now goes to Homo sapiens; will it always do so? ITIS TSNs are very stable. If the "backbone" has IDs/links that aren't stable, but the source databases have stability, we should avoid the backbone. Plantdrew (talk) 15:38, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

At this stage, I will leave this matter to rest. My thanks to all for your time and most thoughtful comments. William Harris • (talk) • 11:13, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

@William Harris:Sorry William, only just saw your ping above. Yes I do maintain a taxon database and try to upgrade portions as new "authoritative" sources come to hand. For the basic outline mammals I still use MSW3/ITIS/CoL (2006 version in the main) for the extant ones, so they are definitely due for an update, but in reality this will most likely wait for the appearance of MSW4 whenever that may be, or in its absence, whatever ITIS (and therefore CoL) may do in the mean time if different. Meanwhile I add a new taxa (genera in the main, sometimes species if of particular interest) as I do sweeps of the primary literature (last done in 2014 via the Thomson Reuters ION database) but wait for the next "authoritive" treatment before implementing more far reaching changes e.g. to families and above, or generic reassignments. For extant orders and above I intend (eventually) to follow the treatment of Ruggiero et al., 2015 (except where this is already outdated), and for families a 2014 version of the same called "Families of Living Organisms" (FALO), although this too is now superseded in some areas. Hope this helps (a little)... Regards Tony Tony 1212 (talk) 22:39, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks @Tony 1212:. For genus Canis - my area of interest - I refer to ITIS/CoL. ITIS will reflect MSW3 unless there is undisputed, overwhelming evidence in favour of something different e.g. the African golden wolf Canis anthus, which has been argued on phenotype for over a century and finally validated by whole-genome analysis. Regards, William Harris • (talk) • 08:19, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

The "Families of Living Organisms" has been updated since 2014 (last update Nov 2017). At least it is for some new families. For mammals it still follows the obsolete MSW3 for orders, but there are additional families that are not in MSW3 (e.g. Prionodontidae in Carnivora).   Jts1882 | talk  09:26, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Nono64 socks cleanup effort (NotWith, Caftaric, Couiros22 et al)

After User:Caftaric's blocking as sock/block evader, more accounts were uncovered. These include the recently-active User:Couiros22, the old and stale but to many editors highly familiar User:NotWith, as well as lesser-known and already-blocked-now-tagged User:R567, User:Wwikix and long-blocked original account User:Nono64.

For the relevant discussion, see User talk:JamesBWatson#What_to_do_now_re_Couiros22 (the most relevant section, but sections Re:Caftaric & Caftaric etc. are also relevant) (permalink up to the as-of-now most recent relevant comment)

As an admin's user talk is not the best place to stage and coordinate a large-scale clean-up effort, I (though anyone else is also welcome to) intend to make an organized subpage of this WikiProject (at Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Nono64 and its talkpage Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life/Nono64; as long as those are red-links, no one has gotten around to creating them yet) to function as central coordination point to determine strategy, keep track of what's been done and who's doing what to avoid folks doubling back over the same edits. Considering there's a six-figure number of edits involved, that's kinda important if we don't want to still be busy in 2030 or so.

Until someone—whether me or not—gets around to it, this notification/discussion will have to serve as staging point. Beats causing notification-hell on our friendly neighbourhood admin's talkpage, at least. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 22:42, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Tasks ahead

Feel free to add additional tasks that need doing

• Creating an LTA page for Nono64/socks;
• Creating a WikiProject Tree of Life cleanup subpage;
• Repair various issues caused with the taxonomic categorization structure:
  • Lepidoptera (discussed on WikiProject Lepidoptera//in progress--AddWittyNameHere)
  • Fish
  • Birds
  • Plants?
• Handle created-out-of-process stub templates&categories (still building that listing--AddWittyNameHere)

Comments/talk/discussion/pings etc.

Pinging the relevant editors from the discussions on JamesBWatson's usertalk & the discussion at WikiProject Lepidoptera: @Plantdrew, DexDor, Nick Thorne, and Loopy30. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 22:42, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

I have already gone through a large number of edits to fish articles where the editor has moved the article name away from the beginning of the article lead. I have not as yet undone any of the categorisation changes. My thoughts are: should we create a list or lists of articles to be checked/fixed? How do we co-ordinate our work? - Nick Thorne ^talk 00:22, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Good question. I've found there's some discussion regarding the identification of Couiros22 as part of the sock drawer, so I've held off on doing anything related to that account for a bit to see what, if anything, comes from it. As for how to organize, depends on what the various folks cleaning up would prefer and how many people even will help out, I guess.

In my personal opinion, I'm not sure a full list of all articles or edits is particularly useful to build. While there are more specific areas where such lists might help—e.g. all categories created, or all out-of-process stub template/category creations—a full, undivided list doesn't accomplish much that going through their User Contributions doesn't other than the ability to add notes regarding completion to it (but then, one could post those notes without a list just as well, just note the begin and end date/timestamps for longer strings of consecutive edits checked and the article names for short strings or separate edits checked).

For issues that can't be identified without looking at the article/edit in question, such as the lead order issues, it's probably similarly a waste of time to do make an issue-specific list: it's almost as much time and effort to put such a page on a list as it is to actually fix the issue.

At this stage, it might be more helpful to just build a list of all the relevant issues that need to be checked on articles they've edited so we don't end up having to clean up after each other for missed issues too. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 01:39, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

I agree it's not worth listing each edit - not least because in many cases the edits were adding a category tag (Spiders of Latvia, Megabovids...) to an article and the category has been or probably will be deleted (thus removing the tag).

Also, some edits by these accounts are correct (albeit without an edit summary of course) or are/will be undone as part of normal editing - I've come across examples of both in the limited editing (unrelated to this cleanup) I've done in the last couple of days (e.g. a good edit by C22).

I've started putting sone notes at Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Nono64. It might be best to continue this discussion on the talk page of that page. DexDor ^(talk) 07:37, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Added some stuff as well, thanks for starting the page. (I'm kinda swamped on Wikipedia at the moment. Trying to handle a couple too many things simultaneously, I suppose—I've been averaging about 600 edits daily the past week and I'm still running into delays like that =/) Probably best if most of the discussion takes place there, yes. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 10:11, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Doctoral thesis to establish a species?

Is a doctoral thesis a sufficient source for a species to be listed? It seems to have been "published" but I can now only find it online through the Internet Archive (see here). I haven't found any solidly reliable source for the species elsewhere. We have articles for ten species, but they are not now listed on the genus page Donacaula. They were removed in 2014 by an account which only made that edit. I'm not sure if I should nominate those pages for deletion or add them back to the genus page. Thanks,  SchreiberBike | ⌨  04:36, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Species named in doctoral theses are invalid nomen manuscriptum. Basically nomen nudum because the form of publication doesn't mean ICZN requirements. IJReid ^{{{T - C - D - R}}} 04:41, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah see, e.g., Scholtens et al., 2015 doi:10.3897/zookeys.535.6086: Donacaula was revised by Martinez (2010) in an unpublished dissertation, therefore the new scientific names are not available until they are published. Umimmak (talk) 05:46, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. I'll take them off to WP:AFD.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:29, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Technically they are not nomina nuda they are unavailable names. This is because that the various codes do not recognise theses as a valid form of publication. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 19:29, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

@SchreiberBike: Best to just redirect them to the genus article and have a sentence there listing them and noting that they remain unpublished referencing that Zookeys article; unavailable taxa names and nomina nuda are valid search terms and these are covered in a reviewed, reliable source as being such. —innotata 03:22, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Taxonomy

Hi,

I'm writing about a modest little bivalve. There is some dispute about its name. The ITIS database (and the rest of Wikipedia, for that matter) refers to it as "Tellina simulans". https://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=81206#null/ The WoRMS database says that this name is no longer accepted and the correct name is "Eurytellina simulans". http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=575431/ Eurytellina was previously a sub-genus and has apparently been promoted. It seems to me that Eurytellina is likely the more "correct" answer in that the new name presents the most current thinking on this topic, and is based on the database that specializes in marine life. On the other hand, I am aware of many instances where biologists fight amongst themselves about taxonomy. Does Wikipedia have a view on what is definitive in taxonomy?

Thanks! Jordanroderick (talk) 15:38, 7 July 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jordanroderick (talk • contribs)

We accept WoRMS as the best reliable source for taxonomy of marine life, as it is maintained by the best specialists in this branch. The name Eurytellina simulans was proposed in 2015 by Huber, M.; Langleit, A.; Kreipl, K. (2015). Tellinidae. In: M. Huber, Compendium of bivalves 2. Harxheim: ConchBooks. 907 pp. The species was originally named Tellina (Eurytellina) simulans by C.B. Adams in 1852. JoJan (talk) 12:53, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Request for comments: Should the automatic taxobox system be the current recommended practice?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

This is continuing discussions elsewhere, such as Wikipedia talk:Automated taxobox system#Reverting to 'manual' Taxoboxes. Sorry if I'm not posting this correctly, I just want to get this discussion started.

It seems there has not been a good clear discussion in the ToL and its related projects on the adoption of Wikipedia:Automated taxobox system over 'manual' taxoboxes like {{taxobox}}. Not all taxa can be converted to automatic (there isn't an automatic version of {{Paraphyletic group}}, for example, and viruses need a new box too). However, the overwhelming majority can use the automated taxobox system.

Should we officially adopt the automated taxobox system as the standard over the previous manual taxobox system? --Nessie (talk) 14:18, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Taxobox system discussion

• Automatic - The system works and allows for easy updates of many articles without needing a bot. If taxonomy templates are set up, novice users can much more easily include boxes for articles, and if not, the system guides them through the process with scarcely more effort than creating a {{taxobox}}. --Nessie (talk) 14:18, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
• So, are you thinking of a guideline that says in essence, "if the required taxonomy can be implemented as an automatic taxobox, then use that in preference of a manual one"? That seems uncontroversial to me. With the caveat that it is possible to get lost in the woods when setting up a new hierarchical template structure, and if someone starts flailing around in there, the damage is somewhat harder to fix than in the manual version (recent exploits with Ornithomimosauria come to mind). But then that possibility is already present, and it's hardly a random-IP-playground type of area anyway. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 15:13, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes, that is what I'm proposing. Some folks seem resistant, and I'm not clear why, so I think it's good to have an open discussion so any concerns are addressed. As for the issues like with Ornithomimosauria, I am unfamiliar with the details but I bet it was easier to notice a problem than if it were buried in a number of neglected articles. Plus a few projects have guidelines such as using WoRMS for the basis of the taxonomy of their project and so forth.--Nessie (talk) 15:29, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

• I'm biassed since I spent a month or so converting the automated taxobox system to use Lua to allow sufficiently deep taxonomic hierarchies and then updating the documentation. So naturally I think that automated taxoboxes are a good idea – with the caveat that there will always be a few special cases that are best handled manually. (Viruses would need a new "Virusbox" template to automate their taxonomy correctly.)

The claim is often made that automated taxoboxes make it easy to update taxonomies, which is partly true. However, it's important to note that when the parent taxon in a taxonomy template is changed, the relevant taxoboxes will update, but all the articles in which those taxoboxes appear still need to be checked. Otherwise you get the case that the taxobox has "Family: Xidae" but the text says "... is a member of family Yidae". (Ideally the text would also be automated, so that for an article on genus G, you would use wikitext like "G is in the family {{member|G|familia}}".) Peter coxhead (talk) 16:29, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Ideally the text would also be automated, so that for an article on genus G, you would use wikitext like "G is in the family {{member|G|familia}}". - Ooh, that would be nice. Nothing like this in existence, I gather? --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 16:42, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Difficult since many fleshed out articles have a sentence more complicated than that, perhaps recognizing past taxonomic history or often in more-studied taxa competing current classifications. If this is done, it should be done with taxa for which there's consensus to follow a particular authority such as WoRMS or the IOC World Bird List, with sentences attributing classifications to these authorities. —innotata 03:14, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

@Elmidae: i think there is something like Template:Q (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs), but that would require wikidata to be consistent with the taxonomy templates. In any event, it ideally would update the article whenever the wikidata entry naming the parent taxon were updated. --Nessie (talk) 14:58, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Hmm... well, Wikidata... I'd rather not go there :/ Different kettle of fish, and not of the most palatable. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 16:38, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Ayup, an extremely common issue with Lepidoptera articles, some of which are actually lagging multiple taxonomic revisions behind at least in part. Plus even when the species articles get updated, half the time no one bothers to update genera articles. (Guilty of that myself as well. There's so much Lepidoptera work to be done that it's basically impossible to tackle every issue in an article at the same time or one issue everywhere, much less every issue everywhere. Plus the more authoritative databases are notoriously slow to update (LepIndex/ButMoth) and the other reasonably-reliable databases either don't cover the entirety of Lepidoptera (e.g. Afromoths; anything (super)family-specific; etc.), also deal with slow updates, or build largely upon LepIndex/ButMoth albeit with some of the newer research reflected as well (Markku Savela/"funet"), making it often hard to tell what's the current taxonomic status of any particular taxon. Still leads to some rather contradictory situations, though) Automated text would be nice, though I can foresee some complications where more complex issues are at play. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 17:24, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

• I agree with others that the automatic taxobox system is what we should be using. On the topic, is there anyway to set higher ranks as bold in a {{speciesbox}} to represent monotypic taxa? It's rather annoying seeing the genus name displayed as a link in every article on a monotypic dinosaur genus, in addition to the occasional monotypic family like Psittacosauridae. Lusotitan (Talk | Contributions) 17:00, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

@Lusotitan: I'm not sure where you seeing monotypic genera linked, but the solution is to use pipes in |link= in the taxonomy template. See e.g. Template:Taxonomy/Psittacosauridae where it has "|link=Psittacosaurus|Psittacosauridae". By making the link before the pipe the title of the article, it will display in bold and won't be a clickable link.Plantdrew (talk) 17:45, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

I random example of where I'm seeing this would be Saurophaganax. Since it just redirects the link doesn't actually work, but it displays when ideally it would be bold as if we were using the {{automatic taxobox}}. Lusotitan (Talk | Contributions) 18:25, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

• Absolutely agree with Peter. It shouldn't be hard to say yes, this should be done where possible. There is the problem of child taxa article texts not being updated, but that could already happen in the manual system when parent taxa articles are updated comprehensively but child taxa articles are not. —innotata 03:14, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

• I'd be inclined to agree (and to have the "member" function in text so it updates also), but would like to see much more explicit citation of taxobox data; if the auto method makes it harder for IPs to randomly tweak taxoboxes without citing sources, then I'm all in favour. Chiswick Chap (talk) 06:12, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

• Support recommending usage of the automatic taxobox system over manual taxoboxes. The automatic taxobox system has been at least somewhat operational since 2011, but had issues that generated errors in many articles. There were some discussions about wide-spread adoption of automatic taxoboxes between 2011 and 2016 that attracted opposition. Further development of the automatic taxobox system and adoption in articles was low during the 2011-2016 period. In late 2016 and early 2017, Peter coxhead substantially overhauled to automatic taxobox system to resolve the previous issues. There has already been a substantial effort since them to convert articles to use the automatic taxobox system. In early of September 2016, automatic taxoboxes were used in ~28,000 articles; at the beginning of July 2018, they were used in ~143,000 articles, or 37% of the ~386,000 articles that use either manual/automatic taxoboxes. In at least half of the Tree of Life subprojects, the majority of articles are already using the automatic taxobox system (see Wikipedia_talk:Automated taxobox system#2 July 2018 usage statistics update). The reason the overall figure of automatic taxobox system is at 37% and not yet over 50% is the massive amount of edits needed to get the articles for plants, Lepidoptera, and (non-Lepidoptera) insects over that threshold, but progress is being made on those fronts. Automatic taxoboxes are the new normal. Automatic taxoboxes are objectively superior to manual taxoboxes, and adoption should be recommended at TOL (I'm running out of words for this evening, but will expand on automatic taxobox superiority if anybody cares to ask) Plantdrew (talk) 03:30, 12 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support. I can think of no reason why the automatic taxobox system should not be the recommended approach. In a few cases the manual taxobox might be useful, but in some cases this is because an appropriate template hasn't been created for the automatic taxobox system (e.g. viruses). The problem of articles being left behind the automatic taxobox changes isn't fixed by having an manual taxobox, it just leaves the article self-consistently out of date. You could argue that the change in the automatic taxobox will flag the change and need to update the article.   Jts1882 | talk  09:41, 12 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support the use of the automatic taxobox system over manual taxoboxes where possible. These substitutions result in less code and easier visibility when editing, and more automatic features (bold, italics, etc) to the article infobox when viewed. Additionally, it helps with standardization (eg. image width), and taxonomic hierarchies can be updated over multiple article infoboxes with minimal effort. Loopy30 (talk) 14:36, 12 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support recommending automatic taxobox system for the reasons above, especially consistency. Bob Webster (talk) 14:01, 13 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support, with the knowledge that some stuff will still need to be done manually, including the main-prose updates if something changes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:25, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support, as summarised immediately heretofore by SMcCandlish et al. JonRichfield (talk) 04:43, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support: as 'strongly recommended' rather than obligatory - with thanks to all who have helped develop and stabilise the system. Roy Bateman (talk) 14:52, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support as preferred, (strongly) recommended form. Would not support making the automatic taxobox system mandatory. In regards to article-vs-taxobox consistency: would it be possible for a bot to keep a list of all changes to taxonomy templates where either the 'rank' or the 'parent' parameters were changed? It would make it easier to check if, alongside an update to the taxonomy template, every relevant article was updated. Right now, it pretty much relies on already being aware of a taxonomic revision; happening to catch the edit to the taxonomy template; or coming across an article where prose and/or categories conflict with the automatic taxobox/speciesbox. (Of course, it wouldn't help find articles where the taxonomy template was created with taxonomy that differs from what (some of) the involved articles state (e.g. a large portion of erebid moths converted to speciesboxes—still plenty of stuff around saying so-and-so is a moth of the family Arctiidae including at least some articles converted to the automatic system), but finding some of the stuff reliably still beats only being able to find the issue either by already being aware of the issue or by sheer luck) AddWittyNameHere 10:40, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

  Not to volunteer someone else, but @Tom.Reding: has made many similar maintenance (and very useful) categories for {{Taxonbar}}, and may have some advice and/or expertise that could be applied to the automated taxoboxes and keeping track of inconsistencies. --Nessie (talk) 16:07, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

NessieVL, I'll have to take a closer look at the taxobox system (a la WP:Automated taxobox system) since I'm only vaguely familiar with it. There are already 9 tracking categories listed on the help page, but I'm not familiar with them either, and how or whether or not they do a good job of catching all/most of the exceptions that may arise. The 2 tracking cats proposed by AddWittyNameHere aren't really implementable, unfortunately. Templates/modules aren't able to look for discrepancies in the article body. To do so, the body would have to be passed to the module, i.e. contained in the template call, which would be more trouble than it's worth for everyone. For the other issue, keeping track/checking to see if a parent taxobox template has been changed would require (I think, given my naïve understanding of the system) duplicating or keeping a record of past parents, similar to the form and function of the |from= parameter introduced to the {{Taxonbar}} template. I'll keep this issue in mind though when familiarizing myself with the auto taxobox system to see if there's an easier way.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  08:48, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

@Tom.Reding: I agree that NessieVL's suggestions, although they would be useful, are difficult or impossible to implement without extensive and burdensome changes to the text. (E.g. if the text of the article contained something like {{check|Felis|familia|Felidae}}, if the taxonomy template for Felis led to a family other than Felidae, an error could be flagged.) The current tracking categories work well for badly set up taxonomy templates or taxoboxes – I monitor them regularly, as does, I think, Plantdrew. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:11, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

• Support much I could add or say has been said above by others in support of this. We already use these extensively on turtle and reptile pages where I tend to edit. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 02:13, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose I think this'll make it hard for the novice editor to fix taxoboxes or maybe just the average reader who stumbles upon an error, because automatic taxoboxes require an editor pretty familiar with Wiki markup, so if ever the taxonomy of a species changes an experienced editor will have to go in and change it, and certainly we can't keep track of every tiny creature that might have a reevaluation as effectively as the passing reader can. Also I've never figured out how automatic taxoboxes work or how to edit them   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  03:12, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

  Can I respectfully suggest you do try to learn how they work and how to edit them. See WP:Automated taxobox system. There's actually far less wiki markup in an article with an automated taxobox than one with a manual taxobox. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:03, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

  An automatic taxobox means less markup on the actual article, but it’s confusing if you have to change a parameter to someone unfamiliar with Wikipedia, it’s not just a straightforward hit-the-little-edit-button-and-do-it. It makes it harder for non-editors reading smaller articles, that us active editors can’t shadow over, to help out if there’s some change in taxonomy   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  17:20, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Speaking of, can someone who understands automatic taxoboxes fix the one on Echidna? It wikilinks Tachyglossa but that redirects back to Echidna   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  18:43, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

@Dunkleosteus77:  Done AddWittyNameHere 18:49, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Speaking of, should we have a volunteer list of folks, or like a page/section for taxonomy template requests? or maybe a maintenance category of genera and higher taxa articles that lack a corresponding taxonomy template? In any event, feel free to hit me up on my talk page if you want a template made. --Nessie (talk) 19:15, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

• Weak support Theoretically I support this proposal but I am not very happy with it. As the creator of a great many species articles, the first thing I do is look for another species article that I can use as a template for mine. If it has got an automatic taxobox, that's fine and I can adapt it for my new article. If its got a manual taxobox, I don't want to start mucking around setting up automatic genus, family and even higher taxoboxes, I want to write my article and use the easiest taxobox available. Novice editors are likely to be even more mystified and might be put off creating their species level article altogether. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 08:22, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

  Most of the time the higher taxonomy templates already exist so it should be easier to use {{speciesbox}} than looking around for a similar taxobox to copy. Your concern is justified in taxon areas where the automatic taxobox hasn't been taken up. When you need to make a three or four taxonomy templates to set up a species box it is off-putting, but the proposal isn't to make the automatic taxobox mandatory. Wider use of the automatic taxobox will make the problem less common.

  One solution might be to setup a request subpage similar to that for cladograms (Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Cladogram requests).   Jts1882 | talk  08:49, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

  Editors can always ask at WT:Autotaxobox. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:59, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

  this sounds like a lot of extra steps and a lot more work than would be saved by putting automatic taxoboxes everywhere. When I started and saw automatic taxoboxes everywhere, I couldn’t figure out how to fix them (because Cetacea had been demoted to infraorder and it needed fixing in places), so I just ended up replacing it with manual taxoboxes and waiting for somebody else to fix the other ones. I tried reading up on automatic taxoboxes but I still never figured them out   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  17:29, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

  Not necessarily a lot more work. If the automatic taxobox system had been in place back then, it would have saved a massload of work surrounding the entire Noctuidae/Erebidae revision, for example. (As things stand, it's still not all up-to-date, even just as far as taxoboxes go.) I suspect it will on average save a lot of work in the highly speciose orders with frequent taxonomical revisions. I imagine the pay-off might be a bit less when it comes to the less speciose areas and the taxonomically stable areas of the ToL, though. AddWittyNameHere 19:15, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

  One thing we could do is include an HTML comment with the auto-taxobox in the article about where to get more info. Maybe point this as a "noob summary" page (and create one for this purpose).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:22, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

• Weak oppose On the same basis as User:Dunkleosteus77. Implementing automatic taxoboxes will make it difficult for an editor unfamiliar with them to fix mistakes, while manual taxoboxes are very intuitive. It's a weak oppose though because I suspect both Dunkleosteus77 and I are biased against the taxoboxes considering neither of us know how they work or how to edit them. Pagliaccious (talk) 17:12, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support, as a recommendation. I have only positive experiences with them and see them as indispensable, but am also against too strong rules that could stifle editing. Micromesistius (talk) 18:18, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support. It seems a bit more concise than the manual taxobox. If I had more knowhow beyond just AWB for automation on Wikipedia, I would have done this for most insect articles already. Kingofaces43 (talk) 22:41, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

• **Very important caveat:** I just want to give a word of caution (because other groups of editors at WikiProjects have been caught up by this issue recently) that per WP:Advice pages, a WikiProject's local volunteers are not allowed to create a "default consensus" approach and then attempt to apply it to all articles they believe are within their purview, even if they are very conservative about deciding what articles qualify. Such editors must still seek WP:LOCALCONSENSUS for any challenged edits, just as they would if this discussion never took place and cannot attempt to put forward the consensus here as the start-point for a discussion. Alternatively, if the editors here wish to create a standard which truly will have the effect of a default consensus, they would need to host said discussion in a central community discussion space like WP:VPP, to be endorsed or rejected by a broad community consensus.

Now, this caution may be less necessary here than it normally is for two reasons: 1) I see a lot of editors here being appropriately careful in their wording, suggesting that they already favour a "yeah, makes sense, but let's maintain some flexability and not consider this a hard and fast rule" approach, and 2) Editors working in ToL/taxonomic areas are kind of an isolated community, so a large proportion of the editors who do this work regularly are likely to see this (or at least, a larger proportion than is typical with other WikiProject members/number of editors working in the associated field generally), meaning that more of the affected editors will be aware of this discussion and thus there will be less incidents of friction and working at cross purposes. But I think the warning is useful all the same: if editors here come to a consensus but then find that they are having a hard time bringing outliers on board, don't try to override differing opinion on individual articles with a link to this thread. Either engage in a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS discussion (without WP:CANVASSING for others here that you know agree with you on the issue) or else reboot this discussion at VPP, where the consensus be given a stronger effect that could be applied to a large swatch of articles. Snow ^{let's rap} 01:44, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

• Support. It looks like automated taxoboxes will on balance reduce work and improve consistency. They should be the recommended method, the default, the standard (as in the RfC); but not obligatory. Maproom (talk) 07:04, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose per Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Gastropods/Archive_6#Automatic_taxoboxes. I will copy my text from there:

I am strong opponent of automatic taxobox (as everybody knows here). The automatic taxobox has the only (theoretical) advantage: the change of all subtaxa is needed to be done only once (at the right place). What will happen, when the editor does not know the right place? There are also difficulties and disadvantages: The complete classification for one species is not on the single place, but it is on as many subpages as there is number of its ranks. Therefore you can not track changes. For example you can not take a look, how the classification of the certain species was like a year ago, because you would have take a look into the history of those about 10 pages all at once. It is prone to errors (to intentional and unintentional). You can not use the same referencing way; you can not add the same certain reference (for the Wikipedia article) into the superior taxon (because it is in different subtemplate).

I can not use automatic taxobox even if I would like to: it is difficult to use and I can not verify the classification, because automatic taxobox has no complex history. That is serious problem when the taxonomy (of gastropods) is extremely difficult and when we have no relatively simple, uncontroversial resource for classification of ALL gastropods (marine, non-marine, fossil). --Snek01 (talk) 11:32, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

I respect editors' right to object to the use of the automated taxobox system, but I think it is important to be clear as to the advantages and disadvantages. It's only partially correct to say that the complete classification for one species is not on the single place, but it is on as many subpages as there is number of its ranks.: the complete classification for a genus is visible at the taxonomy template for that genus; it can however only be changed by editing the taxonomy templates for the relevant ancestral ranks.

The issue of article history is a real one. I have often wished that the Wikimedia software treated templates differently: if you look at an old version of a page, you do not see the output of templates as they were at that time, but as they are now; it would be more informative if the historical version of the template were used if it has changed. So, for any given species, I agree that it's much easier to see changes in its taxobox taxonomy when a manual taxobox is used. This must be balanced against the need to look individually at the taxoboxes of all the species in a genus (a) to ensure that the taxonomy is consistent and (b) to see all their potentially different histories.

@Snek01: I don't understand what you mean by you can not add the same certain reference – can you expand on this?

I don't agree that you can not verify the classification. If the taxonomy templates are set up correctly (and I agree that they aren't always), each should have one or more references for the placement of the taxon in its parent taxon.

If the alternative to an automated taxobox is the grossly malformed one currently at Helix (gastropod), then for me there's no contest! Peter coxhead (talk) 16:16, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. As of references. Lets imagine, for example, that I want to add a reference to the Gastropoda article directly to the taxobox, that the Gastropoda class belongs to the Mollusca phyllym. I do not know how to add the reference directly after the word Mollusca and moreover I want to use the same reference in the text of the Gastropoda article too. - You do not know how do I verify clasification. I verify classification in its complexity based on the history of the article. I am verifying the clasification of all ranks at once directly in the article history. For example I want to see if there are any changes in the classification of the certain species and what was the classification about a year ago. I believe that it is against the verifiability rule on the Wikipedia. Moreover the text of the article and the taxobox should be consistent. When I am not able to track changes of the taxobox, then it is for me as an editor deadly difficult to keep the article content consistent with the taxobox. Personally for me, all information within automatic taxobox are not trustable and therefore such informations are useless for me. --Snek01 (talk) 18:19, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

@Snek01: well, I suspect we're unlikely to agree, but I will respond to your points just once more.

• I think it would be useful to be able to add a single reference to any taxobox, manual or automated, to support the immediate placement of the 'target' taxon – not higher than that, because the classification above that level is covered in other articles and needs to be consistent with them. Just as there's a parameter |synonyms_ref=, there could be a parameter |taxon_ref=. I'll look into how feasible that is. At one time I think it was intended that the reference in the taxonomy template would be included in the taxobox, but that runs into problems, one of which is the requirement that all references in an article are in a consistent style. But maybe if there were just a link that went to the taxonomy template it would be ok. (I seem to remember that Plantdrew once suggested something like this.)
• I see no evidence that articles with manual taxoboxes are less consistent than ones with automated taxoboxes: I'd be interested to see any examples you've come across. In my experience, it's much more common for the taxobox and the lead to be updated, but parts of the body left alone, regardless of the kind of taxobox.
• An important point is that you seem to be ignoring MOS:INFOBOX: "the purpose of an infobox: to summarize (and not supplant) key facts that appear in the article". An infobox does not need to have references for information that is contained in the article, anymore than the lead section does. The purpose of a taxobox is to summarize and aid in navigation. In the latter regard, it's like categories or navigation templates, which not only don't require references, they can't have them. So WP:VERIFY isn't directly applicable.

Peter coxhead (talk) 19:28, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Peter, all of those people, that added 143293 automatic taxoboxes to the Wikipedia and THEN they are asking if they are allowed officially adopt the automated taxobox they are violating Wikipedia rules ad absurdum. It is apparent, that such people do not want to see arguing of others. No, you can not adopt automatic taxobox. --Snek01 (talk) 19:58, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

That is FALSE Snek01. There is absolutely no policy violation, as has already been pointed out, infoboxes should NEVER contain information or references that are not present in the body of the text. How exactly are people who use automatic taxobox violating policy, other then an argument from WP:IDONTLIKEIT--Kevmin § 07:57, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

The question is whether they should be recommended not adopted – as the statistics show, they are widely adopted, and will continue to be. But they can be improved, perhaps. We can't do anything about the history of individual articles, as I explained above, but we might be able to improve referencing. Anyway, my last word in this thread. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:50, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

And "infoboxes should NEVER contain information or references that are not present in the body of the text" is a bit of an overstatement. Taxobox and several other "speciality" infoboxes do in fact do so, in the form of tabular data we do not include in the body, e.g. the organism's entire phylogenetic tree. A lot of medical ones provide OMIM and other database codes, and the cat and dog breed ones provide links to breed standard (which may not all be cited – or need to be cited – in the body). I.e., it's "data" stuff, versus normal content.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:57, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Automating the output of a taxon's 'ancestor' at a given rank

Just as a demonstration, I've created a sandbox function which retrieves an 'ancestor' taxon by its rank from the taxonomy template hierarchy. If it would be useful (and used), it could easily be tidied so that it's called from a normal template and English rank names allowed. Examples:

• {{#invoke:Autotaxobox/sandbox|find|Felis|familia}} → Felidae
• {{#invoke:Autotaxobox/sandbox|find|Felis|classis}} → Mammalia/skip
• {{#invoke:Autotaxobox/sandbox|find|Asparagales|regnum}} → Plantae

You could then write something like ''Felis'' is a genus in the family {{find|Felis|family}}, which would then automatically update along with the autotaxobox if the family of Felis were ever changed.

I suspect this is a step too far, but I thought I'd show that it's possible. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:34, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

It's a useful option to have and does ensure consistency with the article and taxobox system. One issue is the referencing. Any change in classification would need to be sourced (especially if as controversial as moving Felis out of Felidae!!!). One way would be to add the taxonomy template reference. If that is missing, then it would be adding an unsourced change to the article.   Jts1882 | talk  14:44, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

This is really nice. If we don't end up using this directly in articles, could it still be used for maintenance categories? Something like: Category:Taxa articles that do not mention the family listed in the taxonomy template and Category:Taxa articles with parent taxa mismatch between Wikidata and Taxonomy template? Then editors could know which pages need to be looked at, atleast. --Nessie (talk) 16:15, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

My gut feeling is "no(t yet)" for mainspace, but as Nessie says, there are probably a lot of ways it could be incredibly useful for maintenance purposes. Reasons I'd be hesitant to use it in prose include

1. One of the ways controversial or outright wrong changes to taxonomy templates can be found is by seeing a disconnect between prose and taxobox. (I know outright vandalism to taxonomy templates is pretty rare because editing them requires (auto)confirmed status to update/template editor to update high-use taxonomy templates; and taxonomy pages are not very visible and thus aren't likely targets unless someone already knows of their existence. Taxonomy warriors and editors unknowingly working from outdated taxonomy certainly exist though, and misunderstandings of taxonomic revisions can also happen) If/when we get a better way to track changes to taxonomy templates, such as a bot-maintained list or category, this issue won't be as pressing (but would remain a concern, as it'd essentially reduce "people who may find and correct such errors" to "people actively looking for them"+"people highly familiar with the subject matter") The same would happen in regards to categories, which would not be updated alongside the prose. It means people would still need to manually go over each relevant article to update those, but with prose out of the way, people are more likely to forget//other people are less likely to notice the issue until someone happens to do category maintenance on the relevant categories which may well be months or years later. (At least, that's the way those things tend to play out in Lepidoptera. Not sure if the same happens in the less speciose areas?)
2. The more of an article that is populated by use of templates and other somewhat-confusing-to-the-unfamiliar means, the harder it becomes for editors not particularly familiar with Wikipedia, not particularly familiar with templates or not particularly familiar with source rather than visual editing (or on a device that makes source editing impractical) to edit "our" (as in, articles under the banner of, not as in "owned by", ToL or its subprojects) articles and correct issues. Considering the relatively small crowd of taxonomy-related editors compared to the huge number of taxonomy-related articles (about one in 15 articles uses a taxobox of some flavour), the last thing we need is scaring off editors new to the area (or Wikipedia entirely) or unfamiliar/uncomfortable with the more technical side of editing who would otherwise be willing to lend a hand.

AddWittyNameHere 19:40, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Like others have said above this would be very useful for maintenance (perhaps slim the category names down a touch) but I would be very hesitant to include it in text, especially because it does not seem to be worth the work simply to automate a single phrase in an article. The cost-benefit doesn't seem to be a very good use of time. IJReid ^{{{T - C - D - R}}} 20:09, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

I am cautiously positive. This could be a useful aid for maintenance, at least in situations where changes are forthcoming, but time is not (yet) ripe for implementing them in Wikipedia. I'm thinking from the perspective of amphibians where the family-level taxonomy has been quite fluid, and still is—I wish this functionality would have existed when Polbot auto-created masses of amphibian articles. This applies more generally to large-scale stub creation, overwhelming our capacity to maintain articles updated. The downside is ac certain lack of transparency. Micromesistius (talk) 18:08, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Fluid family-level taxonomy seems like a reason to implement this, not a reason not to. Plantdrew (talk) 18:34, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

A lot of the arguments against the automatic taxobox seem to fall on the fact that it is not universally implemented. A contrarian opinion would be that this is a reason to make it mandatory. Get rid of the discrepancies. However, no one is pushing this position. The proposal is that the automatic taxobox is the recommended approach, while leaving individual editors free to continuing using the manual taxobox.   Jts1882 | talk  19:29, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Major changes at Taxonomic rank

An anon with a rotating IP address has been making a lot of non-trivial changes at Taxonomic rank. These should probably be reviewed for accuracy, as they're changing the hierarchical relationships between various ranks.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:13, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

These look broadly accurate but the whole article could use more sourcing, and there's no authoritative list of all in-between/minor taxonomic ranks that some taxonomists have used, so a tough nut to crack. —innotata 03:16, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Probably ranks like Division and Series shouldn't be given as part of a hierarchy. It can be mentioned that some are used a particular way for some groups (e.g. series for fish) but its misleading to suggest it is part of a hierarchy. Benton uses division all over the place, sometimes twice within the same classification. It doesn't mean any more than using clade.   Jts1882 | talk  13:03, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

"Division" is ok for botanical ranks (equivalent to phylum). The automated taxobox system uses the special 'rank' "zoodivisio", which displays as "Division", as a rank immediately above Infraclass[is], but any other use of "divisio[n]" in zoological classification is problematic, and Series is hopeless.

As is also well attested, newly invented ranks like Mirordo and Grandordo are used inconsistently by different sources. For information, the rank descriptors used in the automated taxobox system are at WP:Autotaxobox/ranks; the table can be sorted in different ways, including hierarchical order. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:07, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Remember in the zoological code that only the major ranks are compulsory. Any others may be ignored under the code. Though, if well established, I think some are useful eg suborder, subfamily, subgenus and subspecies also of course subphylum particularly for vertebrates, all the others unless well estabished and consistently used should be ignored in an Encyclopedia at least in the taxobox. Comment about it with refs could be done in the main article if its deemed necessary. However with what is almost random usage for some ranks, and their usage often governed by whether the writers are following ICZN or PhyloCode, its best if taxoboxes remain consistent in usage from my perspective. Without explanation as to why these ranks are being used, and I would add that it should not be for the sake of naming some random clade, it is misleading to include this in the taxobox. We do use a number of them at Wikispecies for example, but we do not suggest they all be used. Only the compulsory ones and a few extra ones. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 21:50, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

By default, the automatic taxobox system only displays the 'principal ranks', although this can be over-ridden. I agree that extra ranks should not be shown in taxoboxes without very good reasons. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:31, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Said user is replacing the auto taxobot with a manual taxobox in a lot of articles. I have no expertize in the area, but I think all these changes are confusing and not helpful for the encyclopedia. - Donald Albury 15:18, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

which "said user" ?? which pages ?? Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 17:35, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

User is now blocked by Courcelles. See here. - Donald Albury 22:40, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry, I would have acted faster in trying to deal with that anon. He/she/it was making a mess in an robotically edit-warring way at cat-related list articles, and I didn't realize it was the same IP until we were at the level-4 warning stage. The block is short-term, but I had the list articles semi-protected until September, and that might work for Taxonomic rank, too. It comes at the cost of excluding other IP editors, though.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:27, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes, the IP chose not to respond to friendly advice on the need for citations, and has made a large number of uncited changes. We probably need to revert all of them for safety. Perhaps the whole automatic taxobox system should be a bit better protected. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:15, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I noticed the activity and thought it strange, but I don't feel qualified to judge taxonomic issues. If it is just a matter of reverting their changes, asking for citations, and protecting articles, I can help, but, as I said, I don't feel comfortable deciding what classifications are correct. - Donald Albury 12:54, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Oh, yeah, it probably would be good to revert what that person was doing. Very few edits I saw them make where legit. It all ranged from insertion of incorrect name, to false facts, to promotional nonsense about WP:NFT cat "breeds", to ungrammatical use of English, to confusing one breed with another, to breaking apart functional, sortable tables into subtopical one that were arbitrary and unhelpful. Skimming the taxonomic and wildlife article edits, all of them look suspect, like changing taxa to different names and so on. I have no idea what's going on, motivationally, but the results are seriously not constructive. Given the tendentiousness, I think that a day or so from now we can expect a resumption, but can quickly get a longer-term block.

On the automatic taxoboxes, yes, that'll all need to be at semi-protected a least, since screwing with it could have wide-ranging negative effects.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:50, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

The taxonomy templates for automatic taxoboxes can only be edited by (auto)confirmed users. Taxonomy templates with a high number of transclusions (1000+, I think) are fully protected. I do think that's a bit much, and is one drawback of the automatic taxobox system. Extended confirmed editors should be able to edit highly transcluded taxonomy templates, or template editor rights should be granted more freely to editors working on ToL articles. At any rate, IP editors can not change taxonomy templates, although they can change which template is called by the automatic taxobox in an article. Plantdrew (talk) 15:37, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Strangely the edits on the sponges seem to be legitimate updates to the taxonomic system currently used by WoRMS, based on a major 2015 revision to take account of molecular data. This is either very bizarre behaviour by one editor or more than one using the account. The changes weren't backed by citations so reversion does still seem the wisest option.   Jts1882 | talk  16:40, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

In regards to reverting I agree playing it safe and reverting all may be the best option. In regards to what @Plantdrew: stated on protection. I agree. Any confirmed user should be able to edit this. It should be noted that although there are a lot of transclusions it may only be (for example) one edit that messes it all up, hence it will only be one revert to fix it. So long as there are plenty of people watching these pages it should be minimal in impact. I think it should be encouraged though, through all portals etc relevant to this, that any changes must be referenced appropriately and we should be strict about this. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 16:45, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Some of us who are actively working with automatic taxoboxes should get in the habit of regularly checking Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Taxonomy templates. This shows all changes to taxonomy templates. By default, links made on Wikidata and newly created templates are shown, but you can set it so these edits aren't shown (new Wikidata links are unlikely to have problems, and if there is a problem with a newly created template, it is likely to show up in some of the error tracking categories under Category:Taxobox cleanup). Filtering out Wikidata and new templates, I recognize most of the editors names and trust their work. Plantdrew (talk) 17:55, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Reptile Database update

I was trying to take a look at the most recent Reptile Database update and all I get is machine language. Anyone out there know if this can be translated to English?...[2].....Pvmoutside (talk) 17:50, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Comes out fine for me, it uses the latest excel in an xlsx format. Are you using the most recent version of the software? It will not work in older excel or likely not in Open Office either if your using this. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 18:28, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I initially used MS Edge instead of google Chrome…...when I used Chrome all went well in the world.....Pvmoutside (talk) 18:41, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

yeah it wont work in that, better to download it and use it Excel. If you want it converted I can probably do that for you if you have an older version of Excel. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 18:48, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Stub template question

There is a list of Wikiproject stub sorting templates here that can be used in stub articles about insects, arachnids, arthropods, and a lot of other scientific topics. There are some users who edit articles and replace the stub template with a new one that is not in this list, usually with a little lower taxonomic rank.

For example, ‎GTBacchus has changed {{Tachinidae-stub}} to {{dexiinae-stub}} and {{ichneumonoidea-stub}} to {{ichneumonidae-stub}}

‎Sbbarker19 changed {{bee-stub}} to {{sweat-bee-stub}}, which was created today.

‎Caftaric (since banned as a sock puppet) changed a lot, such as {{arthropod-stub}} to {{Springtail-stub}} for springtails.

What should be done?

(1) Nothing, it's not a big deal,

(2) Start using the new templates or non-official stub templates (if so, should they be added to the official list?),

or (3) Revert the edits to a template on the WikiProject stub sorting list.

The main thing I was wondering is whether I should stick with the official list for future articles. I was going to post this on the stub project talk page, but it doesn't seem very active and I thought someone here would know.

Bob Webster (talk) 18:22, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

I would bring it to WikiProject Stub sorting. Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals does attract responses, so maybe there are some people watching the main project page. I'd be inclined to go with #2 (and adding them to the list), but I'm not sure what the stub sorting folks think about officially recognizing stub templates that were created without going through their process. Plantdrew (talk) 18:39, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

I've been digging into the stub templates created by Caftaric for a while and have been meaning to bring the problem to project stub sorting. (I got kinda distracted by fixing other Caftaric nonsense and by a variety of maintenance-y/gnomish tasks) The problem is that they're a mixture of "good but needs listing on the official list", "would be valid as an upmerged template but shouldn't have its own category", "this pertains to too few articles to be useful even as an upmerged template", "this is just adding layers of categorization for the sake of adding layers of categorization" (a very common theme with Caftaric) and "otherwise problematic", making it basically impossible to treat the entirety of them the same way. AddWittyNameHere 19:11, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Created a post at the stub sorting WikiProject AddWittyNameHere 19:32, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! I've posted this at the Stub sorting project. Bob Webster (talk) 20:21, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, if people have been creating stub tags and categories without going through the process, they'll be deleted if there's not a consensus that they're needed. Despite being labelled a wikiproject, WP:WPSS/P has been pretty much a formal XfD process since the 2000s.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:19, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018 The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page. To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer. Back numbers are here. Plugging the gaps – Wikimania report Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources. Hackathon mentoring table wiring Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume. If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online". Plugbar buildup at the Hackathon Links ScienceSource focus list (shortcut WD:SSFL on Wikidata), project to tag a first-pass open access medical bibliography on Wikidata, and also overcome the systematic biases in the medical literature by curation. Wikimedia Foundation and Kiwix partner to grow offline access to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation blogpost 18 July 2018. Wikipedia's upcoming Cape Town conference will tackle the issue of diversity, Jamie Matroos, 2 July 2018. VideoWiki, a video version of Wikipedia. Search Full-Text within 4M+ Books, by MEK, The Open Library Blog, 14 July 2018 More than 5,000 German scientists have published papers in pseudo-scientific journals, NDR, 19 July 2018. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Term for a pre-cladistics taxonomic group that turn out not to be directly related

Please jog my memory. I know there's a word for this, for old now-rejected taxa based on visual similarities in the pre-genetics days. Googling for it just brings up "cladistics" over and over again.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:02, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

ummm.... cladistics does not equal genetics. Cladistics was developed in the 70's (Wiley, 1978) prior to the usage of molecular data. So not sure what your getting at. Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 22:13, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Phenetics? Loopy30 (talk) 02:56, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Paraphyletic group? --Nessie (talk) 03:38, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

• I think what you want is "grade" as opposed to "clade", e.g. "monkeys" can be described as a grade. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:59, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
  • Ah, that would qualify for most cases. But polyphyly was the one I was looking for, since even a grade are all fairly closely related, but a polyphyly can just be flat-out wrong, due to lumping together things that are simply the result of coincidental convergent evolution. (It was actually mentioned at Paraphyly, etc., but is the small red bit in the graph, which escaped my notice at first.) I had thought of polyphyly at first, briefly, but figured that wasn't it; I was mis-remembering polyphyly as synonymous with paraphyly due to the similar word, so it took a while to come back around to it. %-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:35, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

    Glad you found what you wanted. However, it's not quite true that even a grade are all fairly closely related. For example, Vermes used to be a taxon of "worms", and is certainly polyphyletic, and not even a grade. But there is a use of "worm" referring to a grade of animals, i.e. a group of not necessarily related animals that have the same general body plan: "worms are simply animals which have retained the general vermiform shape of their ancestors more or less unchanged, having bodies some 2–3 to over 15 000 times longer than wide and flattened or rounded in section" (Barnes, R.S.K.; Calow, P.; Olive, P.J.W.; Golding, D.W.; Spicer, J.I. (2001), The Invertebrates: a Synthesis (3rd ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-0-632-04761-1 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |lastauthoramp= ignored (|name-list-style= suggested) (help), p. 80) Peter coxhead (talk) 10:10, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

    Hmm. Okay, well the evolutionary grade article doesn't make that clear, and the name seems to suggest otherwise (i.e., that there's an evolutionary relationship between the grade members). Anyway, the main reason I was asking was to do this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:59, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

    A better move would be to delete this useless category – a classic Look2See/Notwith/Caftaric effort. A set index article would be more use. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:27, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

New Mammal database in place of MSW3??

Hi, this is picking up issues previously discussed above (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life#Two_issues) regarding the potential successor to MSW3 (2005 I think) for mammals, now significantly out-of-date. It seems there is some traction behind the new online Mammal Diversity Database (MDD) as an updated version of MSW3, see Burgin et al., 2018 https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/article-abstract/99/1/1/4834091, From the article abstract:

"Starting from the baseline of the 3rd edition of MSW (MSW3), we performed a review of taxonomic changes published since 2004 and digitally linked species names to their original descriptions and subsequent revisionary articles in an interactive, hierarchical database. We found 6,495 species of currently recognized mammals (96 recently extinct, 6,399 extant), compared to 5,416 in MSW3 (75 extinct, 5,341 extant)—an increase of 1,079 species in about 13 years, including 11 species newly described as having gone extinct in the last 500 years. We tabulate 1,251 new species recognitions, at least 172 unions, and multiple major, higher-level changes, including an additional 88 genera (1,314 now, compared to 1,226 in MSW3) and 14 newly recognized families (167 compared to 153)."

The database is online at https://mammaldiversity.org/ . It is published by the American Society of Mammalogists (not sure of any implications regarding their views as compared with any others). (By the way, I do not have access to the full paper in Journal of Mammalogy, and sci-hub cannot retrieve it at the moment...). In case of interest - Regards Tony Tony 1212 (talk) 00:06, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

I've being watching this database for the last year. The ASM committee that oversees the database is the successor to the committee that used to oversee MSW. It's good in that the taxonomy is up to date and has nice options for searching via an API (described here), but progress has been slow since the beta version.   Jts1882 | talk  06:39, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

This database seems to be substantially more up-to-date (and promises to remain so), AND is easier to navigate. Those are big pros. The downside is that it seems to lack all information beyond the taxonomic bare bones, plus a distribution map. No details on taxonomic history, type locality, or even synonyms. So it may be a better source to document a species' taxonomic status quo, but provides little beyond that. If that's all that is wanted from this source - i.e., all other detail to be referenced to other sources anyway - then I'd say it would be useful. - NB, if anyone wants the paper and cannot get to it, drop me a mail. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 06:59, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

AfD to convert ICZN into a redirect

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ICZN
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:28, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

Mouse

I'm unhappy with the genus Mus having the title Mouse. a better title would be Mus (genus) or Mus (rodent). Mouse is a pretty broad term which would better apply to a broader category of rodents.......any opinions?....Pvmoutside (talk) 21:32, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

• I agree. It's a classic example of the mistaken desire to use the English name even when it does not meet WP:PRECISION. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:02, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

is "mouse" even monophyletic? We might need two articles, like with salmon and Salmo.

Mouse is applied to elements of at least 3 different rodent families. a small rodent that typically has a pointed snout, relatively large ears and eyes, and a long tail. (Google's definition of mouse is "a small rodent that typically has a pointed snout, relatively large ears and eyes, and a long tail.") Lavateraguy (talk) 15:17, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

Having looked a bit further mouse and rat aren't even restricted to muroids, or even myomorphs; there are castorimorph mice and castorimorph and hystricomorph rats. Also marsupial mice. Lavateraguy (talk) 14:30, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

I'm looking at two things: article content and incoming links.

Article content is godawful (outright plagiarism and the bestiary of a fantasy role-playing game used as a source being among the most egregious problems). But aside from the species list the article content is mostly information about Mus musculus that may not be generalizable to the genus. Peromyscus is mentioned in the lead, and one of the cited sources studied Peromyscus, not Mus. Article needs a complete rewrite regardless of whether it is supposed to be about the genus Mus, or animals commonly known as mice.

Incoming links almost never intend the genus Mus, and could largely be pointed to more precise targets. In articles on medical and molecular biology topics, "mouse" i:s Mus musculus, the laboratory mouse. In pet contexts, it is Mus musculus, the fancy mouse. As a pest, it is probably Mus musculus, the house mouse. In the context of other organisms that are predators of "mice", "small rodents" is probably a better link.

I'd recommend splitting out an article for Mus (rodent) (I'm not a fan of (genus) as a dab term; the single most common reason for title collisions in biological gener:a articles is another genus with the same name). The article history of mouse] is better associated with a title concept that is not about the genus Mus. Split the genus article rather than moving mouse to )Mus.l

lg,

Maybe mouse (disambiguation) should be moved to the base title, and mouse should be moved to "mouse (animal)"? where various small rodents can be discussed? Plantdrew (talk) 03:25, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

Mouse (disambiguation) seems to have a semi-random subset of animals vernacularly known as mice. Perhaps that could be moved to mouse (rodent) and expanded - or put at mouse when all the Mus and Mus musculus content is moved out. (And sea mouse added to mouse (disambiguation)?) Lavateraguy (talk) 15:17, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

Rattus needs similar work to Mus, so if there are no objections, then I can create Mus (rodent) and Rattus articles for the genera by the weekend, then the mouse and rat articles can be expanded or anything else after a discussion if people would like.....as always, any editing help is appreciated......Pvmoutside (talk) 13:48, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Does the existence of Mus (subgenus) complicate things as both the genus and subgenus could be disambiguated by "(rodent)"? Umimmak ( talk) 16:17, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

good point...maybe a better title would be Mus (genus) in this case....Pvmoutside (talk) 17:26, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

In this case, yes. Given the historic record of the taxon, it seems unlikely to have been used for something else (a plant or insect). Given the subgenus article this seems the only practical solution.   Jts1882 | talk  19:20, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Ive split mouse and Mus (genus), and rat and Rattus. feel free to comment on or expand any article.....Pvmoutside (talk) 12:58, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Is there any objection to working through Rodentia and adding the various "mouse" taxa (and removing the random sample from mouse (disambiguation)? Lavateraguy (talk) 11:18, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Is WikiProject Tree of Life the 'Dustbin' for taxa excluded from other projects?

Not sure if this has been addressed previously. I couldn't figure out good search terms for the archives. I'm not sure if any guidelines are already established on this, so I didn't make this an RfC. If it doesn't have any established rules though feel free to RfC it.

Should WikiProject Tree of Life be the default project for taxa not covered by other WikiProjects?

Taxa articles on enwiki are covered by the following categories and their child projects:

• WikiProject Animals
• WikiProject Fungi
• WikiProject Plants
• WikiProject Viruses
• WikiProject Algae

In addition, there are a few projects that are 'polyphyletic' and include any taxa in certain subject areas:

• WikiProject Micro
• WikiProject Marine life
• WikiProject Palaeontology

Many taxa do not fit into the top WikiProjects, like forams or ciliates. Many of those can be covered by one or more of the bottom three WikiProjects. Some, like oomycetes, slime moulds, viroids, and such are 'grandfathered' in with WikiProjects in the top section (whether or not this should be the protocol). But what about taxa that falls through the cracks? Should they be assigned to WikiProject Tree of Life as the backup? Should this also be the case for taxa only covered by one of the three WikiProjects in the bottom section? Does every taxa deserve a WikiProject? --Nessie (talk) 18:53, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Do those groups need a WikiProject? If the answer is "yes", then is a Project composed of "people who care about a different thing (i.e. TOL, and not forams)" going to satisfy that need? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I suspect at least one of them is "no". ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 20:03, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

They don't necessarily need a separate project, but when editors see an article for say an excavate, sometimes they put it in TOL and sometimes not. I just didn't know which is preferred.

I'm inclined to say no, but if I were inclined to say yes, I would've already added the ToL banner to these orphaned organisms a few years back when I was actively adding WikiProject banners to organism articles that lacked them. As it stands, ToL is largely a place for meta-discussions, with most ToL bannered articles being related to taxonomy/systematics as a discipline. However, here are some advantages to have a project banner on articles, and there really isn't any other appropriate banner for non-algae/animal/fungus/plant eukaryotes. There are ToL banners on some forams, and a smattering of other things. Plantdrew (talk) 05:11, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018 The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page. To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer. Back numbers are here. Neglected diseases Anti-parasitic drugs being distributed in Côte d'Ivoire What's a Neglected Disease?, ScienceSource video To grasp the nettle, there are rare diseases, there are tropical diseases and then there are "neglected diseases". Evidently a rare enough disease is likely to be neglected, but neglected disease these days means a disease not rare, but tropical, and most often infectious or parasitic. Rare diseases as a group are dominated, in contrast, by genetic diseases. A major aspect of neglect is found in tracking drug discovery. Orphan drugs are those developed to treat rare diseases (rare enough not to have market-driven research), but there is some overlap in practice with the WHO's neglected diseases, where snakebite, a "neglected public health issue", is on the list. From an encyclopedic point of view, lack of research also may mean lack of high-quality references: the core medical literature differs from primary research, since it operates by aggregating trials. This bibliographic deficit clearly hinders Wikipedia's mission. The ScienceSource project is currently addressing this issue, on Wikidata. Its Wikidata focus list at WD:SSFL is trying to ensure that neglect does not turn into bias in its selection of science papers. Links Wikipedia, Wikidata, and citations, a census, August 2 2018, blogpost by Magnus Manske The rise of Wikidata as a linked data source August 6, 2018, by Karen Smith-Yoshimura on OCLC Research blog Where do Mayors Come From: Querying Wikidata with Python and SPARQL, August 1 2018, Parametric Thoughts blog Newspapers On Wikipedia Update: Initial Wikidata Pass 9 August 2018, Mike Caulfield Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: a systematic comparison of citations in 252 subject categories Alberto Martín-Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea, Mike Thelwall, Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, arxiv.org, submitted on 15 August 2018 If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Plant 'described in' decadal categories submitted to CfD

@ Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 August 26#Category:Plants described in the 1750s, per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#Request for comment: categorizing by year of formal description.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  01:03, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Request for comments: Denny the hybrid hominin

This is a request for comments regarding the relevance of Denny (hybrid hominin) as it relates to human interspecies breeding. The link to the discussion is at: Talk:Human evolution#A curious discovery, but not really on-topic. Cheers, Rowan Forest (talk) 16:38, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Change from Anobiidae to Ptinidae?

I think the beetle family Anobiidae should be replaced by Ptinidae according to Bouchard (2011). This is effectively a name change, because all the subfamilies will remain the same. I'll be happy to do this, but I thought I should check here first to see if there are any objections... Bob Webster (talk) 20:21, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Did you ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Beetles? --Nessie (talk) 00:37, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

No, I'll do that. Thanks! Bob Webster (talk) 04:48, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

It's done now. Bob Webster (talk) 05:02, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

But the article has lost its edit history. Anobiidae should have been moved Ptinidae rather than copy and pasted. This would have moved the page history to the new title and left a redirect. Now the history is on the redirect page.   Jts1882 | talk  06:41, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

What's the best way to fix this? Bob Webster (talk) 18:35, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

@Edibobb:, see WP:HISTMERGE. Short answer is to put {{Histmerge|Anobiidae}} at the top of Ptinidae. Plantdrew (talk) 20:02, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

RfC being planned

Please see WP:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Primary_genetics_studies. Jytdog (talk) 23:45, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Any desire to eliminate 'X described in the YYth century' type container categories?

Since removing the 'middlemen' decadal categories (e.g. Category:Plants described in the 2010s) is generally uncontroversial, I'm wondering what the opinions are about the century categories (e.g. Category:Fish described in the 20th century). The century categories' contents are limited, by definition, to 1 category page, since they'll always contain less than 200 entries. The resulting Category:Crustaceans by year of formal description-type categories would need up to 2 category pages, since they will have at most ~265 subcats, and it would take at least another ~35 years for them to spill over onto a 3rd category page. Is this enough of a barrier to want to keep the century cats, or is there another reason to keep them, or is there a desire to remove them?   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  13:20, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

The 'ideal' size of a category is a matter of opinion, but although I'm very much in favour of the removal of the decadal categories, I think it's worth keeping the century categories as per WP:DIFFUSE. Peter coxhead (talk) 14:17, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Category reason explanation

Hello, may I ask what is the reason of the category Category:Taxonomy articles created by Polbot? It is not clear to me from the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life/Archive 39#Category for Polbot pages, similar to Qbugbot?. I wish if I could understand how is this category used. Thank you. --Snek01 (talk) 17:02, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Whether it's still useful, I'm not sure, but articles created by this bot had some common potential issues (e.g. small categories were created that needed upmerging). So it was useful to have a tracking category during clean up. It might be complete now. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:47, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Grouping articles created via bot is useful in and of itself. Additionally, Polbot created a vast number of non-taxonomic articles, making separating out the relevant ones a tedious task that many, including myself, would not want to repeat.

I do not have any plans to run through them again in the near future (completing the transfer of {{IUCN}} templates to CS1|2 comes to mind, but that wouldn't happen any time soon), but that is no indication as to future problems, systematic irregularities, standardization changes, etc., that may or may not exist/need to be performed.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  21:24, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

So the reason of existence of this category is Tom's unproved claiming that "Grouping articles created via bot is useful". And this category is not used anyhow. Thank you for cluttering up 30 thousands of articles with useless category. --Snek01 (talk) 21:58, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

@Snek01: who said the category wasn't used? Categories have different uses: directly, by readers researching topics (not relevant for this category); immediate maintenance, by editors looking at articles in a category that may be problematic; indirect maintenance, as a component of a Petscan search when narrowing down articles with particular problems. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:14, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Peter for reply, but your answer was not useful for me at all. I said, that because Tom to my direct question answered nothing concrete. So if anybody could answer the following questions as simple as possible, that would be great. How was the category used in the past (since its start in March 2018)? How is the category used now? (By the way, I am on your side. I think, that bots should be used much more often on Wikipedia. But this category seems not good to me. If I will see something good in this, I could propose more categories like this for the better Wikipedia.) --Snek01 (talk) 10:23, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

This was a requirement for the recent stub creation BRFA for Qbugbot (i.e. Category:Articles created by Qbugbot). The difference being that Polbot did not go through the same approval process (either b/c it didn't exist at the time or the bot ignored doing so, not sure), and therefore did not adopt community standards such as this. Since you don't like it, you might consider hiding hidden categories via your preferences.

Off the top of my head, I used this category to aid in the partial transfer of {{IUCN}} templates to CS1|2, due to Polbot's systematic referencing style. Other editors might have used it as well, but point is moot; even if completely unused (not the case here)/finished use (which it's not; technically it's still in use until the {{IUCN}} transfer is complete)/etc., there's no good reason to remove it.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  12:40, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

@Snek01: that category was not created March 2018. It has been around since 2007, when I started editing Wikipedia. It was assigned to each article that the Polbot bot created, because until that point editors were creating individual articles about various taxa; Polbot created tens of thousands of missing articles using (I believe) the IUCN website (if I remember correctly). I think the Polbot category was designed to let us editors quickly know whether a bot or a human had created the article — and to allow us to quickly check what articles might need further work without having to slog through individual article history pages. MeegsC (talk) 14:46, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for comment, but you, MeegsC, are not telling the truth. Lets taken a look at the first article in the category https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aba_roundleaf_bat&oldid=148149698 It was created by the Polbot but it has not been assigned in 2007 to any category indicating, that it was created by a Bot. --Snek01 (talk) 15:18, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Ah. I guess I'm just remembering the hidden comment at the top of all of the articles. I certainly don't appreciate you accusing me of lying though; you seem to be unnecessarily confrontational over this!  : / MeegsC (talk) 08:20, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

I agree.

Snek01, feigned civility followed by attacking other editors that oppose your view 1) is not appropriate for a discussion, 2) will not move editors to your side, 3) will turn potential participants away from the discussion/interacting with you. Consider WP:STICK, look for more fertile editing ground, and possibly modifying your preferences for hidden categories.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:04, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Thank you Tom for your reply. Could you let me to know, where is exactly written that creating the Category:Taxonomy articles created by Polbot is a requirement for the Qbugbot 2, please? (I did not found it.) I appreciate your effort improving the IUCN references. But was it really necessary to include the category into so many articles? Can not it be done without creating of such categories in the future? Can it be done in similar cases with other ways in the future? Moreover, you claimed on the category description that it should never be removed. It is a maintenance category for the clean up. (I do not make a difference between "tracking" and "maintenance"). Couldn't it be possible to deal with that after the complete cleanup? Imagine the situation, that number or many of those articles became featured articles. Will it still be useful? For example, what is this category inside the featured article Red-backed fairywren for? Shouln't we try to get rid off as much of maintenance categories for easier editing? Or does it mean that every new or old Bot creating articles will have its own category forever? --Snek01 (talk) 15:18, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Tom, did you really used this category for improving the IUCN template? I think, that you were improving the template in the January 2018. And THEN you added the category in March 2018. Could you provide an evidence, that you edited format of the IUCN template after the adding the category into the article? Just to be sure that we have a fair discussion. --Snek01 (talk) 15:51, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

@Snek01: I can only speak about plant and spider articles. Initially, Polbot generated articles contained HTML comments like <!-- This article was auto-generated by [[User:Polbot]]. -->. When the Wikimedia software was extended to allow searches using insource:, it was possible to find these articles for maintenance. However, the comments have routinely been removed as articles were manually edited, not always appropriately in my view, with the result that Polbot articles that may have needed attention couldn't be found. As I said above, I think a tracking category is useful, although there's a case for not using it for GA and FA articles, perhaps. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:20, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

@Snek01: Please remember to assume good faith. You seem to be accusing several editors of lying. I read your response to MeegsC as implying that they had lied. If you meant that they were mistaken, you could have worded your response better. No good can come of that. - Donald Albury 00:41, 17 September 2018 (UTC) edited - Donald Albury 20:22, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

I am sorry I was not sensitive enough to cultural differences. I am sorry of misunderstanding due to language barriers. I wish if we could overcome it in the future. I do apology. --Snek01 (talk) 21:41, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Apology accepted Snek01! I know English isn't your first language, and some of these things can be pretty subtle. :) MeegsC (talk) 08:51, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

RfD - Sea squirt et al.

@ Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2018 September 17#Sea squirt.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  13:35, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Spiders 'described in' decadal categories submitted to CfD

@ Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 September 22#Category:Spiders described in the 1750s, per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#Request for comment: categorizing by year of formal description.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  12:44, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Navseasoncats or Category in year for category navigation?

Option 1: {{Navseasoncats}} example here, showing 5 before and 5 after.
Option 2: {{Category in year}} example here, showing 4 before and 4 after, but this can be altered to 5/5 if that is a major deciding factor.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:52, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

• Option 1, as it looks cleaner to me.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  15:11, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

"List of mammal species" article

List of mammal species was just created. Could I ask project members to note their opinion on whether we a) need this, and b) if yes, what form it should take? In its current incarnation, I find it both ugly and undesirable. I suppose the most frequent problems with vast list articles - vague inclusion criteria, impossible to curate, open-ended and arbitrary selection - don't apply here; still I don't feel that this is the way to present a navigational article for mammals. We already have fine taxonomic navigation, and who the heck is going to look them up by alphabet? --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 14:53, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

I hate to be one to style-shame, but that's pretty hard to wade through, @Cloud forest:. I do appreciate the effort, and think the article should be allowed to exist, after some sprucing up. I agree that a taxonomic listing is better than alphabetical. If the latter is still desired, a sortable table could be used. --Nessie (talk) 16:00, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

Unless you wanna follow List of dinosaurs and keep the alphabetical order   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  21:42, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

I suppose - if a desirable list, then that would be a good format. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 13:13, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

A lot of work will be needed to turn the redlinks blue: every entry is linked by specific epithet alone. I'm working on the bluelinks to DAB pages. Narky Blert (talk) 14:25, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

I'd favor we WP:TNT the article and start over with a taxonomic listing instead of alphabetical. Enwebb (talk) 14:29, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

There is already a List of mammal genera.   Jts1882 | talk  14:38, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

I'd say just redirect there instead at a minimum if not TNT. The article isn't needed at all. I've gone ahead and PRODded it for now. Kingofaces43 (talk) 15:17, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Deprodded by one of the usual suspects - was worth a try though. I'll try to make the time tomorrow to summarize this discussion and put it up at AfD. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 16:19, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm out of time for a bit to craft an AfD, otherwise I would have done that in response. I'll be back to revisit in a day or two though. Kingofaces43 (talk) 16:37, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

If there's an AFD, I'll see it and contribute. I've made 32 edits to the page over 3 days, and I haven't finished with the bad links starting 'a-' yet. Narky Blert (talk) 17:13, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I'm unclear on why this page has been created and, in its current form it is not much use. Most of the species names are redlinked or link to inappropriate targets (disambiguation pages, place names, asteroids, plants, insects, etc) and it seems that it will take a lot of work to fix it. A sortable table might have some utility. Someone might be curious about how many species where named after a person (e.g. temmincki after Temminck) or place (sinensis). There would also have to be some indication of why the putative species included (i.e. sources). If someone made the effort to fix it, I would support its continued existence. Alphabetic listings are fairly common in encyclopedias, even though Wikipedia has other more convenient means of navigating. But in the current form it seems more appropriate in user or draft space.   Jts1882 | talk  14:36, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

The best place to find out about taxa named for or by Temminck, either by a common name or by a specific epithet, is in Coenraad Jacob Temminck. It isn't a difficult article to find. There are similar arguments for all other authorities and epithets. Narky Blert (talk) 00:03, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

As to why and where from: it's a straight copy from Wikiversity [3] where someone is having fun compiling huge taxo lists. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 15:00, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Ah, the same editor. There was a discussion about the purpose and need to make proper citations on the [users talk page and it didn't seem to be make much progress.   Jts1882 | talk  15:30, 25 September 2018 (UTC)#

This sort of pointless list, of enormous size and basically no encyclopedic purpose, and of course no citations, is exactly what Wikipedia does not need. If the creator can't take the hint from other editors then they'll need to take a more direct suggestion from an admin. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:43, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

I agree with Chiswick Chap.....Pvmoutside (talk) 17:10, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Putting any misgivings of layout style and potential utility aside, I think Jts1882 is correct in identifying that the already existing article (List of mammal genera) is a better place to add any new contributions on this subject. Loopy30 (talk) 20:56, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

I like List of mammal genera, which is organised by orders and families. I do not like this article. If you know enough to search for a species by the generic part of its binomial name, it's redundant. Narky Blert (talk) 23:47, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

I am in general agreement with others on this. There is no constructive form to the list. I was not aware of these lists I also looked at the Reptilia one, not complete, and wonder where its going. They are so cluttered with text, effectively, with no structure it rendors them unusable. I wonder why Wikiversity is permitting this honestly. But not my decision. I do hope there are not plans to use this here. Link to better structured lists, wikispecies and wikidata for this type of info I think. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 00:35, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Well, the PROD has been removed, so AfD is the next step, if anyone feels like drafting a statement of the reasons for deleting it. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:11, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Isn't it redundant? - youall already have List of placental mammals and List of monotremes and marsupials. Lavateraguy (talk) 08:08, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Indeed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:23, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

I don't think it is redundant as the organisation is different. Many people are not familiar with the taxonomy and might prefer an alphabetical listing. I personally don't find much utility in such lists as Wikipedia has better methods of searching for information, but if other editors are prepared to put in the work on such lists, I accept that others will find them useful. A more useful list might be one big sortable table with subclass, orders and families, but such a large table (>6000) entries probably wouldn't work well and is better suited to a database or spreadsheet that can be got from MSW3 or the ASM mammal diversity sites.   Jts1882 | talk  09:18, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

It's a historical accident that there wasn't already a list of mammal species, rather than the topic being divided between two articles. In theory you could merge those two articles, but there might be problems doing it cleanly. The list of mammal genera doesn't link neatly to the lists of species. (I've added See Alsos, but there may be a better solution.) I also note that list of mammal genera changes format halfway through, as if it's a work in progress. Lavateraguy (talk) 21:34, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

• I started an AfD discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of mammal species. Please feel free to comment as needed. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 13:04, 26 September 2018 (UTC)
• II U — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cloud forest (talk • contribs) 18:41, 29 September 2018 (UTC) Father told me "never start a Sentence with I" Cloud forest (talk) 18:54, 29 September 2018 (UTC)